Kyoto

Kyoto was drawn before it was built: in 794 the emperor laid out a chessboard of avenues on the Chinese model, with the palace at the top and the Kamo river down the eastern side, and for a thousand years the capital kept the pattern and filled the hills around it with what it needed to think about the seasons — two thousand temples and shrines, a golden pavilion and a silver one, a rock garden of fifteen stones you can never see all at once, a stage of wood over a valley of maples, ten thousand red gates climbing a mountain, and a bamboo grove that sounds like rain. Gion keeps the geishas and the teahouses; the market of Nishiki keeps the kitchen; and the whole city keeps a calendar in which the cherry and the maple are the two great feasts.

The traveller gives a day to the east — Kiyomizu-dera at eight, before the coaches, then down through Higashiyama's lanes to Gion, and north along the Philosopher's Path to the Silver Pavilion; a day to the west — Arashiyama's bamboo at dawn, the Togetsukyō bridge, then Ryōan-ji's stones and Kinkaku-ji's gold; a day to the centre — the Imperial Park, Nijō's nightingale floors, Nishiki for lunch; and a dawn, any dawn, to Fushimi Inari, climbing the torii before the world wakes. The evening belongs to Pontochō by the river, or to a bowl of something warm in a place with six seats.

The Guide's honesty: Kyoto in cherry and maple season is the most visited city in the country and feels it — book beds months ahead, walk early, and love the famous places before nine or after five —; the buses are full and slow: the subway and your legs are better; geishas are not a spectacle — the maiko hurrying to work in Gion are working, and photographing them like wildlife is now fined —; temples close at four or five and shrines never; and Kyoto's restraint is the whole point — the city does not shout, and rewards those who lower their voice.