Kyoto Imperial Palace

A marked route of about a kilometre through the palace enclosure, past the major ceremonial buildings. The centrepiece is the Shishinden, the hall of state where emperors were enthroned, standing alone on a white gravel court with a cherry tree on one side and a citrus on the other. Then the Seiryoden, the Kogosho, the Oikeniwa garden with its pond and bridges, and the Otsunegoten residential hall.

You do not go inside anything. The Imperial Household Agency is explicit about this: none of the palace buildings can be entered. You look through open doors and from verandas. For some people that is a disappointment; for others the architecture read from outside, in its own courtyards and at its own scale, is the more legible experience.

A word on age: the buildings are nineteenth-century reconstructions, rebuilt in 1855 after the last of many fires, in the Heian style rather than as Heian originals. The site is not even the original site – the palace shifted east from the true Heian-kyo location centuries ago. What it is, accurately, is the best available reconstruction of a courtly architecture that nothing else preserves.

The palace sits inside Kyoto Gyoen, a walled park of around ninety hectares in the middle of the city, open at all hours and entirely free. Before the Restoration this was a dense quarter of two hundred aristocratic residences; when the court moved to Tokyo they were cleared, and what remains is gravel avenues, enormous pines, orchards and a great deal of space.

It is the only large flat green space in central Kyoto and it is startlingly empty given where it is. The weeping cherries at the north end flower a week or so before the rest of the city, which makes the park a useful hedge if your dates are early, and the plum grove in the south-west runs from late February.

Two other enclosures inside the park – the Sento Imperial Palace and the Omiya Palace – do still require advance application, with age restrictions. It is the confusion between these and the main palace that keeps the ‘you must book’ advice alive.

Nearest station is Imadegawa on the Karasuma subway line, right by the north-west corner. Marutamachi at the south-west corner works for the park. Entry to the palace itself is through the Seishomon gate on the west side.

Allow an hour for the palace route, or two if you take the free guided tour – four daily in Japanese, twice daily in English and Chinese, and an audio-guide app for everyone else. The information desk is open 8:40 to 17:00 and is closed on Mondays with the palace.

The whole visit is outdoors on gravel, so comfortable shoes matter and rain is a genuine problem – on a wet day swap it for Sanjusangendo or the National Museum. It pairs naturally with Nijo Castle, fifteen minutes south-west, which is instructive: the shogun’s palace, which you walk through, against the emperor’s, which you do not.