Who ruled Nara?

Nara lies in the north of Nara Prefecture on the island of Honshu, on the border with Kyoto Prefecture. As Heijō-kyō it was the seat of the Japanese emperors for most of the eighth century, a period that is still named after it, and the great Buddhist temples founded there in those decades made it a religious centre long after the court had left. Today it is a city of around 360,000 people and the capital of Nara Prefecture.

The area was settled long before the capital was built: the city contains a number of large ancient burial mounds, or kofun, among them the Gosashi, Hishiage and Uwanabe tombs. Before 710 the court sat at Fujiwara-kyō, the first Japanese capital laid out on the grid pattern of Chang'an. Tradition records that the name Nara comes from a word meaning to level or flatten, though this explanation in the old chronicles is generally treated as folk etymology.

In 708 Empress Genmei ordered the court to move from Fujiwara-kyō to a new site, and the transfer was completed in 710. Heijō-kyō was planned on the model of Chang'an, the capital of Tang China: broad avenues divided it into a regular grid, with the palace at the north end facing south, and the main avenue, the Suzaku-ōji, ran 3.7 kilometres from the city gate to the palace gate. Unlike Chang'an it had no walls. The city covered more than 25 square kilometres and, by modern estimates, held between 50,000 and 100,000 people at its height. Goods and ideas from China, Korea and further along the Silk Road reached the court, and its administration followed law codes adapted from Tang models.

Great monasteries moved to or were founded in the new city. Kōfuku-ji, the family temple of the powerful Fujiwara clan, was rebuilt there in 710. After a smallpox epidemic and other disasters in the 730s, Emperor Shōmu promoted temples in every province and in 743 commissioned an enormous bronze statue of the Buddha Vairocana for Tōdai-ji, the head of the provincial temple network; the statue was dedicated in 752. Temple records claim that some 2.6 million people contributed to the project. Between 740 and 745 the court moved to other palaces before returning. In 784 Emperor Kammu abandoned Heijō-kyō for Nagaoka, and in 794 the capital settled at Heian-kyō, later Kyoto.

Without the court, the city's temples still kept their spiritual standing, and Nara became known as Nanto, the southern capital. Kōfuku-ji in particular kept its importance through its ties to the Fujiwara. The temples' armed monks were drawn into the conflicts of the late twelfth century: after Nara supported a failed rising against the Taira clan, Taira forces attacked at the end of 1180 and set fire to the city. According to accounts of the Genpei War, thousands of non-combatants died, and Kōfuku-ji and Tōdai-ji, including the hall of the Great Buddha, were burned. A rebuilding of Tōdai-ji associated with Minamoto no Yoritomo and entrusted to the monk Chōgen began in 1181, and the guardian figures of its great south gate were carved by Unkei and Kaikei in this period.

The Great Buddha Hall has been rebuilt twice after fires; the present hall, finished in 1709, is about 30 per cent smaller than its predecessor. During the Edo period Nara grew as a market town, and sightseeing became popular enough for printed visitors' maps to circulate.

In the Meiji period, when Buddhism was associated with the fallen shogunate, Kōfuku-ji lost land and its monks were made Shinto priests. Nara was formally made a city on 1 February 1898. Excavations since 1974 have traced the line of the Suzaku-ōji, and a section of it was restored in 2010, the 1,300th anniversary of the capital. In 1998 UNESCO listed the Historic Monuments of Ancient Nara, including Tōdai-ji, Kōfuku-ji, the Kasuga Shrine and its primeval forest, Yakushi-ji and the Heijō Palace site, as a World Heritage Site. In 2022 the former prime minister Shinzo Abe was shot dead while campaigning in the city. Nara remains the capital of its prefecture in Japan and one of the country's principal centres of historic tourism.