The Land Boat Pine

Ashikaga Yoshimitsu, the shogun who built the Golden Pavilion, once kept this tree as a bonsai in a pot. Sometime after Yoshimitsu's death in 1408, his potted pine was planted in the ground beside Kinkaku-ji's Kyoko-chi pond and trained into the shape of a sailing ship, its trunk and branches clipped over generations to suggest a hull, a mast and a bow pointed deliberately west, toward the Buddhist Pure Land. The result, Rikushu-no-matsu, land boat pine, has been maintained in that same nautical silhouette for roughly six centuries, making it one of the longest continuously shaped ornamental pines in Japan and one of the three trees Kyoto names among its most celebrated. Nineteenth century photographs from the 1870s and 1880s already show it in recognizably the same boat form it holds today, meaning the shape itself, not just the tree, has outlasted the Meiji Restoration, two world wars and the reconstruction of the pavilion after a 1950 arson fire.