Daigo-ji

A five-storey wooden tower on open gravel: about 38 metres tall, and the bronze spire on top accounts for a third of it. Finished in 951, it is the oldest building still standing in Kyoto. The temple takes its name from daigo (the word an old man used, in its founding record, for the taste of spring water), and in 1598 Toyotomi Hideyoshi, in the last year of his life, had 700 cherry trees carried in for one afternoon's party here.