What it is
A single wooden hall, very long and very narrow, holding 1,001 statues of Kannon: a large seated figure in the middle and a thousand standing ones in ten tiered rows either side of it, all gilded, all facing you.
The name means thirty-three bays, counting the spaces between the pillars down the inside. The hall runs to about a hundred and twenty metres.
How old
Founded in 1164. The building burned and the present hall dates from 1266, which makes it one of the older wooden buildings in a city that has lost most of its old wooden buildings to fire.
Many of the statues are originals rescued from the fire; the rest were carved to replace those lost, by workshops working over decades.
⚠️ Why you have never seen the inside
Photography is not permitted in the hall. That is why every image of this place — including every one on this page — is of the exterior, the garden or the roof.
⭐ Treat that as a recommendation. It is the one major sight in Kyoto that cannot be photographed, and it is the one people most often describe as the thing they actually remember.
