Now that I've dazzled you with the temple's beauty, I'll have to let you down a bit by telling you it's a fake. But the good news is I can tell another story to pad out my text. While the golden pavilion stood unharmed for 650 years, in the 1950's, a student monk burned it to the ground. Nobody's been able to figure out why he did it, although a popular book posits that the monk, who was ugly, was so taken with the beauty of the temple, which he would never share, that he couldn't bear to look at it any more. My money's on insurance fraud, but that's not nearly as poetic. Anyway, it was reconstructed to perfectly match the original, and it remains a beautiful sight in a beautiful setting.

Just when you're thinking the temples are all starting to look the same, along comes Kinkaku-ji to shake things up. This was built again as a retirement home for a shogun in 1393. This time, the shogun couldn't devote himself full time to the usual moongazing and teamaking because his ten year old son had succeeded him, and presumably the ten year old needed a bit of help now and then. Especially because during that time there was a civil war, and famine and plague in Kyoto. An estimated 1,000 people a day died in the city due to these problems, so it was quite a handful to bequeath to the ten year old.