Kyoto Gyoen National Garden

This guide to Kyoto Gyoen National Garden centers on August the twentieth, eighteen sixty four, when roughly three thousand Choshu samurai and masterless swordsmen marched on the Hamaguri Gate in front of you, determined to break through and seize the emperor. The gate takes its name from a clam, a nod to an older fire that forced it open for fleeing crowds decades earlier. Waiting on the far side stood roughly fifty thousand shogunate troops, including the Aizu clan and Satsuma soldiers under a young commander named Saigo Takamori.