The Nara period was the era of Japanese history that ran from 710 to 794 CE, named for the country's first lasting capital, at Nara. Modeling itself on Tang-dynasty China, it was the age when Japan set out to build a centralized state ruled by written law, compiled its earliest histories and poetry, and made Buddhism an instrument of the throne.
Emperor Shōmu meant the Great Buddha of Tōdai-ji to be a shield. Cast from bronze on a scale the islands had never attempted and sheathed in gold, the seated colossus was to wrap his troubled realm in the Buddha's protection. Raising it swallowed much of the country's copper, drove laborers and miners to exhaustion, and drew down a treasury already thin. Yet within a single generation the court that built it, worn by disease, factional murder, and a monk who nearly seized the throne in a god's name, abandoned Nara for good and, after a false start elsewhere, began again in the city that became Kyoto. The age that reached hardest for permanence proved one of the shortest in Japanese history.