Items Excavated from the Platform of Gangoji Pagoda (Jade

Gold, Beads, and Coins from a Lost Nara Pagoda

In 1927, archaeologists working at a quiet plot in the southeastern corner of Nara cut into the raised earthen platform where a five-story pagoda had once stood. Clustered close to the great stone that had carried the building's central pillar, they recovered a small assemblage of buried valuables: a thin sheet of gold, lumps of gold, curved magatama beads, beads of glass and rock crystal, and a scatter of early copper coins. These objects, registered together as a single lot, are the Excavated Artifacts from the Foundation Mound of the Gangō-ji Pagoda Site (Gangō-ji Tōshi Dodan Shutsudohin).

The pagoda they came from no longer exists. It belonged to Gangō-ji, one of the great temples of the ancient capital, and it burned to the ground in 1859 after a fire spread from a neighbouring house. What survives above ground today is a low platform and a ring of foundation stones, hemmed in by ordinary houses. What survives from below ground is this handful of objects, now kept at the Nara National Museum, and they carry the story of how the tower was first consecrated more than twelve centuries ago.

A Temple With Roots in Asuka

To understand the find, it helps to know the building it came from. Gangō-ji traces its origin to Hōkō-ji, better known as Asuka-dera, the temple founded by the powerful courtier Soga no Umako at the end of the sixth century and generally regarded as Japan's first full-scale Buddhist monastery. When the court established its new capital at Heijō-kyō, present-day Nara, in 710, the temple was re-founded on a fresh site, with construction at the new location carried out over the following years and the name changed to Gangō-ji. By tradition it counted among the seven great temples of the southern capital.

At its height the temple occupied much of what is now the old-town district of Naramachi. A main hall, a lecture hall, monks' quarters, and a towering pagoda once stood across the grounds. The complex declined from the middle of the Heian period onward, and over the centuries fire, neglect, and the slow encroachment of the town broke it apart. Today three separate temples carry the Gangō-ji name, each holding a fragment of the original precinct. The objects described here come from the eastern pagoda site, now a small Kegon-sect temple in the Shibanoya-chō neighbourhood, and should not be confused with the World Heritage temple of the same name a short walk away.

What Was Buried, and Why

Placing precious objects beneath the foundation of a pagoda was an established practice in early Japanese Buddhism. Gold, beads, fine glass, and coins were set into or around the base of the central pillar as a dedicatory deposit, a ritual offering meant to anchor and protect the building at the moment of its founding. Scholars call such assemblages chindangu, and the Gangō-ji material is read as one of them.

The coins are what make the deposit so useful to historians. Three types appear among them: Wadōkaichin, first struck in 708; Mannen Tsūhō, issued from 760; and Jingū Kaihō, issued from 765. All three belong to the series of imperial copper coins minted under the early state. Because the latest of them were not cast until the 760s, the offering could only have been sealed away in the second half of the eighth century. That single chain of reasoning fixes the act of consecration squarely in the latter Nara period and gives a hard date to a building that has otherwise vanished.

The gold tells a quieter story about value and intention. A flattened strip of gold and small gold pieces were committed permanently to the earth, never to be seen again, alongside the beads and coins. The choice of materials, durable, lustrous, and costly, reflects both the wealth of the temple's patrons and the seriousness with which the founding rite was treated.

Looking Closely at the Objects

The assemblage rewards slow attention. The magatama, comma-shaped beads with a single drilled hole, reach back to a far older Japanese tradition of personal ornament and ritual; finding them folded into an eighth-century Buddhist offering shows how deeply the older bead culture persisted. The glass beads, described in the old records as ruri, would have caught the light with a deep blue or green cast, while the rock-crystal beads stayed clear and cool. Set against the dull copper of the coins and the soft yellow of the gold, the group must have made a striking little hoard when it was first gathered for burial.

None of these pieces is large. Their importance lies not in scale but in their context: each was chosen, handled, and laid down by people performing a single ceremony at a fixed moment, then left undisturbed for roughly twelve hundred years until a spade reached them in 1927. Standing before the case at the museum, it is worth picturing the central pillar of the tower rising directly above this small cache, the whole weight of the pagoda resting symbolically on the offering below.

Visiting the Site and Seeing the Find

The objects themselves are held at the Nara National Museum, where archaeological material from across the region is shown on a rotating basis in the permanent galleries. Because displays change, anyone hoping to see the actual gold, beads, and coins should check the museum's current exhibition listing before a visit rather than assume they are always out.

The pagoda site is a separate, and quieter, experience. Tucked among the houses of Shibanoya-chō, the Kegon-sect Gangō-ji preserves the platform and the great foundation stones of the lost tower. The scale of those stones has led some to estimate that the pagoda rivalled the five-story pagoda of nearby Kōfuku-ji, roughly fifty metres tall, while older records claim a height of twenty-four jō, closer to seventy metres. Either way, this was one of the tallest wooden structures of its age. The temple opens irregularly, so it is wise to confirm access in advance.

One detail repays the walk. In front of the present hall stands a stone lantern carrying an inscription dated 1257, said to be the oldest dated stone lantern in the city of Nara. A local legend holds that the lantern once cried out at night, earning it the nickname of the "weeping lantern." From here it is only a few minutes on foot to the World Heritage Gangō-ji at Gokurakubō, whose Main Hall and Zen Hall are National Treasures and whose roof still carries some of the oldest tiles in Japan, and to the lanes of Naramachi, with their old merchant houses, cafés, and craft shops.