Heian-jingū

Vermilion pillars, blue-green tiled roofs, a wide court of raked white gravel: it looks like an emperor's palace and feels a thousand years old. Almost none of it is what it seems. Heian Shrine was raised in 1895 as a five-eighths-scale copy of a palace hall that had burned more than seven hundred years earlier and was never rebuilt. Walk in beneath its giant torii, the gateways that mark a shrine, and hear how a city rebuilt what it had lost.