Heian Palace Ruins / Imperial Palace Ruins / Chodoin Ruins /

Heian Palace Site: Walking the Buried Capital of Old Kyoto

Stand at the crossing of Senbon-dori and Marutamachi-dori in Kyoto, look at the asphalt, and you are looking at the floor of the Daigokuden — the ceremonial throne hall where Heian emperors received their court on New Year's Day. There is no building above it. The hall burned in the Angen fire of 1177 and was never rebuilt. What remained passed underground, where archaeologists since the 1950s have been recovering it piece by piece: a stretch of tuff-stone foundation here, a corridor base there, fragments of green-glazed roof tile that once shone above the throne.

The national historic site officially called Heian Palace Site — Imperial Residence Site, Chōdō-in Site, Burakuin Site (Heian-kyū Ato, Dairi Ato, Chōdō-in Ato, Burakuin Ato) gathers these protected fragments under one designation. The palace itself, the political and ceremonial heart of the capital founded by Emperor Kammu in 794, occupied a rectangle of roughly 1.1 kilometres east-to-west by 1.4 kilometres north-to-south on what is now a quiet stretch of central Kyoto. The site has no admission gate, no ticket booth and no reconstructed buildings on the original ground. It is read instead through stone markers, explanatory boards, glimpses of foundation behind fencing, and the spatial logic of streets that still follow the Heian grid.

From Capital to Wasteland: Eleven Centuries of Disappearance

Heian-kyō was Japan's longest-serving ancient capital. When Emperor Kammu moved the court here from Nagaoka-kyō in 794, the new palace was laid out at the northern centre of the city, fronted by the great avenue of Suzaku-ōji — today's Senbon-dōri. Pass through the Suzakumon gate, and the visitor faced the Chōdō-in, the formal government compound. To its west stood the Burakuin, a roughly parallel enclosure used for state banquets. The dairi, the emperor's residential quarters, sat to the northeast.

The wooden core of this complex did not survive its own success. Fires struck repeatedly through the Heian period. The Burakuin's main hall burned in 1063 and was never restored; by the late tenth century the compound was already described as a near-ruin. The Daigokuden in the Chōdō-in followed, lost in the great Angen fire of 1177. From the late twelfth century, the imperial court relocated permanently to the Tsuchimikado palace east of the original grounds — the lineage that became today's Kyoto Imperial Palace. The old palace land turned to grass and fields, which is why the area is still called Uchino, meaning the "inner field," a name that records the absence rather than the building.

What followed scrambled the ground further. In the 1580s Toyotomi Hideyoshi raised his palatial Jurakudai across much of the former palace zone, and when he tore it down only eight years later the demolition disturbed the underlying strata. Centuries of houses, gardens and modern streets layered on top. That the archaeology survives at all owes much to the fact that no large modern building project ever swept the area clean.

How the Site Came to Be Protected

Designation as a national historic site began with a single discovery. Between 1963 and 1973, three campaigns of excavation traced a continuous tsuiji corridor — an earthen wall topped with a tiled roof — running for about 27 metres north to south, with a tuff-stone base roughly 12 metres wide. The same form of double corridor had been confirmed at the earlier Nara-period palaces of Heijō and Nagaoka, where it served to enclose the imperial residential quarters. Its appearance at this Kyoto location was the proof archaeologists needed: this was the inner enclosure wall of the dairi itself. In December 1979, the area was protected under the name Inner Corridor of the Dairi at Heian Palace.

The second piece arrived through a 1987–88 excavation about 450 square metres in size, which exposed the platform of the Burakuden — the main banqueting hall of the Burakuin. The remains included the cut-stone tuff platform, two stair foundations on its north side, sockets for vanished pillar bases, and an offering pit on the west containing three ceramic vessels including a tripod tray, evidently buried as part of a ground-purification rite. In 1990 this area received its own historic-site designation as the Burakuden Site. In July 2008 the two designations were merged, additional discoveries north of the Burakuden — the foundation of the Seishodō rear hall and a connecting corridor — were added, and the unified site took on the broader name used today. The Chōdō-in components were folded in by further additions, giving the full present-day title.

A 2015 re-measurement of the Burakuden platform produced an unexpected result: its plan matches the second Daigokuden of the earlier Heijō Palace in Nara almost exactly. The current working theory is that the Burakuden was not built from scratch in Kyoto but physically relocated from Nara when the new capital was founded — timber, tile and all.

What There Is to See on the Ground

The visit begins, by convention, at the Senbon-Marutamachi intersection. Four explanatory boards stand at the four corners. The northwest corner marks the position of the Daigokuden. A nineteenth-century stone obelisk dedicated to the hall was erected in 1895, set up inside the small Uchino Children's Park just north of the crossing, to commemorate the 1100th anniversary of the founding of Heian-kyō. Later survey work showed the actual centre of the throne hall was about 60 metres southeast of the obelisk — closer to the curb of the intersection itself. The discrepancy is partly an early-Meiji measuring error and partly the slow drift of magnetic north over a thousand years; the obelisk has been left where it stands as a historical artefact of its own.

Walking west along the south side of the old Marutamachi-dōri reaches the actual protected ground of the Burakuden. A fenced rectangle of low platform and exposed stone marks the northwest part of the hall and the southwest part of the Seishodō rear hall, with the connecting corridor between them. Reading the explanatory panels alongside, it is possible to reconstruct in the mind the original scale: a nine-bay-by-four-bay hall on a tuff-stone base, decorated with green-glazed tile, with bronze chigi-style ornaments at the gable ends. The actual roof fragments, including a substantial portion of a shibi ornament and a metal eave-end fitting, are now displayed as Important Cultural Properties at the Kyoto City Archaeological Museum north of the site.

Further north, off Shimochōjamachi-dōri, sits the protected stretch of the dairi inner corridor — the foundation that started the whole designation. Here too the visible remains are modest: a platform and a stone-paved drainage channel for rainwater, fenced and signed.

Where to Make Sense of What You Have Seen

For most visitors, the indispensable companion to walking the site is the Kyoto City Heian-kyō Sōsei-kan, a free exhibition hall on the ground floor of Kyoto Asny, the city's lifelong-learning centre. It sits about ten minutes' walk west of the Senbon-Marutamachi crossing, on the former grounds of the Miki-no-Tsukasa, the bureau that brewed sake for the imperial table. Pavement tiles outside the entrance trace the post-holes of one of its storehouses, exposed in excavation and preserved underneath.

Inside, the centrepiece is a 1:1000 model of Heian-kyō roughly ten metres by eleven, considered Japan's largest urban reconstruction model. Beside it sits a 1:20 reconstruction of the Burakuden, useful precisely because the real hall is no longer there to be seen. Smaller models cover the Toba detached palace south of the city and the lost Hosshōji temple complex with its eighty-one-metre nine-storied pagoda. A wall-mounted ceramic-tile reproduction of the National Treasure Rakuchū-Rakugai-zu screen — the Uesugi version, painted by Kanō Eitoku — adds the later medieval city for comparison.

Volunteer guides offer free explanations between 10:00 and 16:50. The hall is closed on Mondays. There is no charge.

Around the Palace Site

Several places in walking distance fill in the picture. Shinsen-en, the strolling pond garden a few blocks south of Nijō Castle, is the surviving fragment of a much larger imperial pleasure garden first laid out at the founding of Heian-kyō. Heian Jingū, across the city in Okazaki, is a Meiji-era five-eighths-scale reconstruction of the third-generation Chōdō-in, offering the most concrete visual answer to the question of what once stood at Senbon-Marutamachi — though built later and on a different site. Nijō Castle, of the Tokugawa period, is the obvious detour for visitors short on time, fifteen minutes' walk to the southeast. The Kyoto Imperial Palace, current home of the surviving Heian ceremonial halls Shishinden and Seiryōden, lies about twenty-five minutes' walk to the east and provides the architectural vocabulary that the underground remains can only suggest.