Kohfuku-ji Temple National Treasure Museum

This guide to the Kohfuku-ji Temple National Treasure Museum in Nara opens in eighteen sixty-eight, when a single government order stripped Kofukuji of its monks, its lands, and its walls overnight and folded the compound into what is now Nara Park. It follows what came next for a temple with no one left to protect it, including a five-story pagoda put up for sale for what would be almost nothing today, and a dining hall on this very site that did not survive at all. Listen for how what the temple managed to save ended up housed in the building standing in its place.