Sanjusangendo

One thousand and one statues of Kannon stand in a hall 120 metres long, the longest wooden building in Japan. There are five hundred on each side of a large seated Kannon carved by Tankei in 1254, when he was eighty-two. The effect on walking in is difficult to describe and hard to absorb: rank on rank of gilded figures receding into the dark, each about human height, each with eleven heads and forty-two arms.

Taira no Kiyomori built the hall in 1164 for the retired emperor Go-Shirakawa. It burned in 1249 and 124 of the original statues were carried out of the fire; they are back in the rows now, alongside 876 replacements carved over the following sixteen years. The name comes from the thirty-three bays between the pillars, thirty-three being the number of forms Kannon takes to save people.

In front of the rows stand twenty-eight guardian deities and the wind and thunder gods, all National Treasures, and these are the ones to look at closely. They are portrait sculpture rather than icons: bulging eyes, ropey veins in the forearms, crystal inlaid into the eye sockets. The tradition is that among the thousand Kannon you will find a face you recognise, and people take a surprising amount of time over it.

Photography is not allowed inside. Entry is around 600 yen and takes maybe forty minutes. In mid-January the temple holds Toshiya, an archery event dating from the Edo period, when hundreds of twenty-year-olds in kimono shoot the length of the west veranda. It is free to watch and very crowded. Kyoto National Museum is directly across the road.