Object description

Yamada-dera was a Buddhist temple established in the Asuka period in Sakurai, Nara Prefecture, Japan. The area has been designated a Special Historic Site and forms part of a grouping of sites submitted in 2007 for future inscription on the UNESCO World Heritage List: Asuka-Fujiwara: Archaeological sites of Japan’s Ancient Capitals and Related Properties. Excavations in the 1980s uncovered a well-preserved section of the temple's covered corridors that predate the surviving buildings of Hōryū-ji: "for the history of Japanese architecture, this discovery is of as great moment as the finding of the seventh-century Takamatsuzuka tomb paintings in March 1972 was for the history of Japanese art."