Hōryū-ji burns and is rebuilt: the world’s oldest wooden buildings

Tradition, based on an inscription on the halo of the temple’s Yakushi Buddha, holds that Hōryū-ji was completed in 607 by Empress Suiko and Prince Shōtoku beside the prince’s palace at Ikaruga; scholars doubt that the inscription is as early as it claims. The Nihon shoki records under 670 that ‘a little after midnight Hōryū-ji caught fire; not a single building was left; there was heavy rain and thunder’. Until the late 19th century the temple was believed to have survived from Shōtoku’s time, and from about 1887 historians who trusted the chronicle argued with architectural historians who held that the buildings were in the style of the Suiko period — the ‘rebuilding debate’ lasted for half a century.

It was settled in 1939, when Ishida Mosaku excavated the Wakakusa-garan, the remains of an earlier temple just south-east of the present one: its pagoda and hall stood in a line in the manner of Shitennō-ji, its axis was turned some 20 degrees to the north-west, and its tiles were of the oldest type. Fragments of wall paintings found nearby in 2004 had been burnt at over 1,000 °C. The present western precinct is thus a rebuilding: a Buddhist service held at the temple in 693 shows that the Golden Hall was finished by then, and in 711, according to the temple’s inventory of 747, the clay figures inside the pagoda and the guardian kings of the middle gate were made. Tree-ring studies by the Nara National Research Institute for Cultural Properties published in 2004 showed that the timber of the Golden Hall, pagoda and middle gate was felled between the late 650s and the late 690s — that of the Golden Hall before 670, which suggests to some researchers that work had begun before the fire. A separate study of 2001 dated the outermost ring of the pagoda’s central pillar to 594; the pillar may have been reused from an earlier building.

With their columns swelling towards the middle and their cloud-shaped brackets, the Golden Hall, the pagoda — some 32.5 metres high — and the middle gate preserve the so-called Asuka style, found elsewhere only in the pagoda of the neighbouring Hokki-ji and in that of Hōrin-ji, since lost to fire. A fire during repairs on 26 January 1949 badly damaged the Golden Hall and its wall paintings, and in December 1993 the temple and Hokki-ji, inscribed as the Buddhist Monuments in the Hōryū-ji Area, became one of Japan’s first four World Heritage Sites.