Japanese Tower

This guide to the Japanese Tower in Brussels follows King Leopold the Second's trip to the eighteen ninety-nine Paris World's Fair, where he bought an entire oriental exhibition hall on the spot and shipped it home for architect Alexandre Marcel to build a museum tower around it. It covers the Belgian carpenters who attempted traditional nail-free construction before Marcel lost his nerve, and the imported craftsmen who filled six chambers with chased copper, stained glass and lacquer panels from Japan. Look closely at those chambers for work later experts called unmatched outside Japan itself.