Beauty Through the Ages: Treasures of the Imperial Collections

In 756, on the forty-ninth day after the death of the retired Emperor Shōmu, Empress Dowager Kōmyō offered about 650 of his favourite belongings and 60 kinds of medicine to the Great Buddha of Tōdai-ji; that gift began the Shōsōin collection, and its inventories survive with it. The raised wooden storehouse, its walls of timbers stacked crosswise in the azekura style, was designated a National Treasure in 1997. The treasures include painting, calligraphy, metalwork, lacquer, glass, musical instruments, masks and ancient medicines, as well as documents recording life in the Nara period. Many designs come from Persia and western Asia, which is why the Shōsōin is called the eastern end of the Silk Road; recent research, though, finds about 95 percent were made in Japan in a foreign taste. The Imperial Household Agency looks after them, and the main chance to see them is the Shōsōin Exhibition at the Nara National Museum each autumn, held since 1946 with sixty to seventy carefully chosen pieces.

Look closely at one pattern, a bird, a flower, or a figure, and ask where it came from: does it look Chinese, Persian, or already Japanese?