Enryaku-ji Temple

This guide to Enryaku-ji, the mountaintop monastery above Kyoto, opens with the night in 1571 when the warlord Oda Nobunaga surrounded the mountain and set it ablaze. It traces the temple back to its founding in 788 by the monk Saicho, and how Enryaku-ji grew into a small city of thousands of buildings with its own army of warrior monks, feared even by emperors, until it stood in Nobunaga's way. Only one small thirteenth-century hall, the Rurido, survived the fire untouched, tucked away on a path few visitors find.