Nara

Where it is

Nara sits in a basin at the southern end of the Yamato plain, ringed by low wooded hills and about forty kilometres inland from Osaka Bay. It was laid out in 710 as Heijō-kyō, on a rectangular grid modelled on the Chinese capital at Chang'an — a planned city, dropped onto farmland, on a plan borrowed from a thousand kilometres away.

The land and water around it

• The Nara basinbasin

  Flat, enclosed and well watered — the heartland of the early Japanese state, dense with burial mounds long before the grid was laid out.

• Mount Kasuga's primeval forestforest

  Hunting and felling were prohibited there from the ninth century, which is why an old-growth forest sits against a city. Protection for religious reasons preserved an ecosystem as a side effect.

• The Yamato riverriver

  Drains the basin west toward Osaka Bay. It gave the inland capital its link to the sea and to the continent beyond it.

Its history, in short

Before Nara, the seat of government moved on the death of each sovereign. Heijō-kyō was an attempt to build a permanent capital in the Chinese manner, and it held for most of the eighth century — long enough to give its name to a period, and to see the state commission Buddhist temples on a scale that strained it. The court moved away in 784 and then to Heian-kyō, now Kyoto, in 794, reportedly in part to escape the political weight of the Nara temples. The capital's departure is why so much eighth-century fabric survives here: the city stopped growing over itself.

Timeline

Dates are shown on a timeline rather than as changing shapes on the map. The globe draws modern boundaries only, and tinting a modern outline to stand for a historical one would state something we cannot source.

Places that carry meaning

• Tōdai-ji8th century, rebuilt

  Built as the head of a national network of provincial temples. The scale was a statement about the state as much as about the religion.

• Hōryū-ji7th century

  South-west of the city, with a pagoda and hall generally dated to the seventh century — the reason claims about the world's oldest wooden buildings point here.

• The Heijō palace site710–784

  Largely open ground, excavated rather than built over, because the capital left and the fields returned. Reconstructed gates stand among the archaeology.

Learn the language here

1. 1Understand which languages are spoken hereNara is multilingual. Start with which languages are used, by whom, and for what — the phrase list only covers one of them.Written by Globe Quest

Check yourself

• What was Heijō-kyō's plan copied from?

  The Tang Chinese capital at Chang'an

  A grid on the Chang'an model, laid out on farmland — though unlike its model Nara was never walled.

• Why does so much eighth-century fabric survive at Nara?

  The capital left, so the city stopped building over itself

  Losing capital status preserved the palace site as archaeology instead of as foundations under a later city.

Worth arguing about

• A capital was moved partly to escape the influence of its own temples. What does a state do today when an institution it built grows too strong?
• Nara is well preserved because it was abandoned. How much of what we can see of the past is an accident of decline?

Related places