The Golden Pavilion: The Peak of Warrior Power That Yoshimitsu Built at Kitayama

In 1397 (Ōei 4), at Kitayama in Kyoto (the modern Kita Ward, Kyoto City). Ashikaga Yoshimitsu, now forty, began construction of a large-scale complex of residences and temples known as the 'Kitayama estate' on this ground.

The central three-story pavilion structure would later be covered in gold leaf and come to be called the 'Golden Pavilion.

The three stories of the Golden Pavilion each adopt a different architectural style.

The first story is shinden-zukuri (the Heian-period kuge residential style); the second is shoin-zukuri and warrior-style (warrior residential); the third is Zen Buddhist hall style.

It is interpreted that Yoshimitsu deliberately showed in architecture 'the fusion of kuge, warrior, and Zen.

' A rare case in which a warrior-origin figure visualized the political message that he stood at the peak of both kuge culture and Zen culture, in the building itself.

Besides the Golden Pavilion, the Kitayama estate laid out many buildings — shinden, shoin, goma-dō, tsuri-dono, kannon-dō, senbō-dō — and became the center of politics of the time.

Yoshimitsu gathered kuge, warriors, Zen monks, and poets here, and formed a new cultural sphere that fused Nō, renga, ink painting, tea ceremony, and Chinese-object connoisseurship.

This is the cultural peak of the early Muromachi period, called 'Kitayama culture' by later generations.

After Yoshimitsu's sudden death in 1408, the Kitayama estate became the Zen temple Rokuon-ji by his testament.

Other buildings were gradually lost, but only the Golden Pavilion (Shariden) was miraculously preserved through the Muromachi, Sengoku, Edo, and Meiji periods.

In 1950 it was destroyed by arson; rebuilt in 1955; gold leaf re-applied in 1987.

The current Golden Pavilion is a 'rebuilt version of Yoshimitsu's architectural conception,' and was inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1994.

A rare case in which Yoshimitsu's conception of power lives on as the center of tourism six hundred years later.