Kinkaku-ji

You enter, walk a short path, and the pavilion appears across Kyoko-chi, the mirror pond, at almost exactly the angle every photograph of it uses. That is the view. The path then curves behind the building, climbs past Anmintaku pond and the Sekkatei teahouse, and delivers you to the exit by way of a shop and a tea stall.

There is no loop back. If you spend your first ninety seconds at the pond getting a phone out of a pocket, you have spent the best part of the visit on your pocket. Stand still at the railing for a full minute before you photograph anything, because you are not coming back past it.

The one-way system is also why the site absorbs its crowds better than its reputation suggests. Nobody is coming the other way, nobody doubles back, and the queue keeps moving even when the coaches arrive together. It is busy, but it is rarely stuck.

The pavilion you see is not the fourteenth-century one. The original was burned down by a novice monk in 1950, and the current structure was rebuilt in 1955 with the gold leaf renewed in 1987. That matters less than people expect: the setting, the pond, the islands and the planting are the medieval composition, and the building sits in it exactly where it always did.

The three floors are deliberately in three different styles – a residential ground floor in plain unlacquered wood, a samurai-house middle floor, and a Chinese Zen hall on top, with the gold applied only to the upper two. That grading is the whole idea of the building, and it is visible from the pond if you know to look for the join between the bare timber and the leaf.

You never go inside. Neither here nor at Ginkaku-ji. Anyone who tells you the interior is worth the ticket has not been.

Nine o’clock, at the gate. Kinkaku-ji cannot open earlier than the coaches, so the only advantage available is being in the first group through. By eleven the pond railing is three deep and the pause you wanted is not available.

This is also the one big Kyoto sight that is genuinely improved by bad weather. Snow on the roof is the famous version, and even heavy rain flattens the pond into a better mirror and thins the crowd. If you are choosing which sight to save for a wet morning, this and Sanjusangendo are the two.

Because the visit is short, it wants pairing rather than a slot of its own. Ryoan-ji is a twenty-minute walk south-west; the Manga Museum is a straightforward bus back into the centre. What does not work is trying to combine it with Higashiyama on the same morning – they are on opposite sides of the city, and the bus between them is the slowest hour in Kyoto.