Kyoto

The city was founded in 794, when Emperor Kanmu moved the court from Nara to escape the influence of its monasteries and laid out Heian-kyo on a Chinese grid plan against the eastern, northern and western hills. For four centuries the Heian court set the standards of Japanese poetry, dress and manners, and produced the Tale of Genji. Power drifted to warrior governments in Kamakura and later back to Kyoto under the Ashikaga shoguns, whose Muromachi era gave the city the Golden and Silver Pavilions, Noh theatre, the tea ceremony and the dry landscape garden.

The Onin War of 1467 to 1477 was fought in the streets and burned most of the capital, opening a century of civil war. Toyotomi Hideyoshi rebuilt Kyoto in the 1580s and 1590s, moving temples into a single district, raising an earthen rampart around the city and fixing much of the street pattern that survives. Under the Tokugawa shoguns, who ruled from Edo, Kyoto remained the emperor's home and the country's centre of crafts, publishing and refined trade.

In 1868 the emperor left for Tokyo, and the city lost its court, its officials and a good deal of its population. It answered with industry and invention: a canal was cut from Lake Biwa in 1890 to bring water and power, Japan's first electric tram ran here, and Nishijin weavers took up mechanical looms. Kyoto escaped the firebombing that destroyed other Japanese cities, which is why so much survives. Seventeen of its temples, shrines and castle sites were inscribed together as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1994, and the Kyoto Protocol on climate change was agreed here in 1997.

Kyoto thinks of itself as the keeper of Japanese tradition, and much of what the outside world regards as classically Japanese was codified here: the tea schools of Urasenke and Omotesenke, flower arranging, incense appreciation, Noh and Kyogen theatre, the dry garden, and the kaiseki meal. Crafts remain central — Nishijin silk weaving, Kiyomizu pottery, fans, dyed textiles, lacquer, knives and paper — and many workshops still stand in the townhouses of the streets where they have always been.

The geiko districts are the most photographed part of that inheritance. Gion, Pontocho, Miyagawacho, Kamishichiken and Gion Higashi train maiko and geiko in dance, shamisen and conversation, and put on public dances each spring and autumn; the tea houses themselves work by introduction. Pressure from visitors has led the city to close some private lanes in Gion to visitors and to prohibit photographing geiko and maiko without their permission.

The festival calendar is one of the fullest in Japan, from the Aoi Matsuri's court procession in May through the Gion Matsuri in July to the bonfires of Gozan no Okuribi in August. Kyoto is also a young city: tens of thousands of students attend Kyoto University, Doshisha, Ritsumeikan and a dozen others, filling the cheap restaurants and bookshops of the north-east. Locals are known nationally for a courteous, oblique way of speaking that can leave outsiders unsure whether they have been praised or dismissed.

About 1.4 million people live in the city, in eleven wards spread over the basin floor and up into the hills; the population has been slowly falling for years as housing costs rise and younger families move to the suburbs of Osaka. Kyoto is unusually shaped by planning rules: strict height limits, controls on rooftop signs and billboards, and protection for views of the hills keep the skyline low and even.

The economy mixes tradition with technology. Nintendo, Kyocera, Shimadzu, Omron and Nidec are all based here, alongside sake brewing in Fushimi, textiles in Nishijin, and a large university and hospital sector. Tourism employs many and strains more: crowded buses, rubbish, short-term lets squeezing out residents and rising rents in the central wards are constant subjects of local debate, and the city has closed some private lanes in Gion to visitors and pushed crowds towards trains and quieter districts.

Everyday life runs on the grid of numbered streets, on bicycles and on the subway. Machiya townhouses, deep and narrow with an interior garden, still line many central blocks, though they are expensive to maintain and thousands have been lost. Summer routine bends around the heat — early errands, shaded arcades, evenings by the Kamo River, where couples sit in a line along the bank — and the year is marked by the seasonal foods and festivals that Kyoto follows more closely than most Japanese cities.

Kyoto cooking, kyo-ryori, was shaped by distance from the sea and by the demands of court and temple. Without fresh fish, cooks worked with vegetables, tofu, dried and salted seafood and a clear, restrained dashi. Kyo-yasai — local varieties such as kamo eggplant, mizuna, shogoin turnip and bright red manganji peppers — are treated as a speciality in their own right.

Kaiseki is the formal expression of this: a sequence of small seasonal courses that grew from the meal served before tea. Its vegetarian ancestor, shojin ryori, is still eaten at temples, and yudofu, tofu simmered in kelp broth, is the standard dish of the restaurants around Nanzen-ji. Yuba, the skin lifted from heated soy milk, appears in soups and rolls. Everyday cooking is obanzai, several simmered and pickled dishes set out together, and the city's pickles, tsukemono, are famous enough to be sold as gifts — senmaizuke, made from thin slices of turnip, is the winter one.

Street and market food is plainer: nishin soba, buckwheat noodles with a fillet of dried herring; saba-zushi, mackerel pressed onto vinegared rice, once carried in from the Sea of Japan along the Saba Kaido; and skewers, soy milk doughnuts and pickles eaten walking through Nishiki Market. Sweets are a Kyoto art, from yatsuhashi, cinnamon-scented rice-flour triangles folded around bean paste, to the matcha desserts made with tea from Uji. Sake is brewed in Fushimi, where soft water gives a mild, rounded style.