The thousand-year imperial capital of Japan, laid out on a Chinese grid in 794 as Heian-kyo to seat the emperor's court, which became the heart of Japanese art, religion, and refinement — and which was spared large-scale firebombing and the atomic bomb during the Second World War, surviving as the living museum of classical Japan.
In the summer of 1945, American planners drawing up a list of cities to destroy with the new atomic bomb put Kyoto near the top. It was large, culturally important, and largely intact, having been spared the major firebombing that devastated many Japanese cities. Then the city was struck off the list. The decision is usually credited to the US Secretary of War, Henry Stimson, who is said to have insisted that Kyoto's temples and shrines be spared on cultural grounds. The bomb fell on Hiroshima and Nagasaki instead. So Japan's old capital, the city where the emperor held court for more than a thousand years, came through the war with its wooden temples and narrow lanes intact. That survival is why Kyoto stands today as the closest thing there is to a living museum of classical Japan.