Dynastic History | Heijō First Daigokuden 第一次大極殿 — The Hall That Was Carried to Kuni

The Daigokuden 大極殿 was where the court did its largest formal business: accession rites, New Year assemblies, the reception of embassies. The first hall at Heijō stood from 710. In the 740s the court dismantled it and carried it to Kuni, where the 続日本紀 records the work taking about four years and finishing in 743 — a claim excavation later supported, when digging from 1970 found the Heijō hall's plan matching the main hall of the Yamashiro provincial temple that occupies the Kuni site. A second Daigokuden was afterwards built at Heijō on a different alignment.

The capital did not outlast the century. In 784 the court left for Nagaoka, and ten years later for Heian. The reasons in the record are administrative and factional; nothing about them requires a story of decline. Heijō's grid went back to fields, and it was still farmland when a retired emperor toured the district in the late ninth century — which is a large part of why so much of it survives underground. Campaigning by local residents from the Meiji and Taishō years led to protection; part of the site became a special historic site in 1952, sustained excavation began in 1959, and the site was inscribed on the World Heritage list in 1998.

The hall on the platform today was completed in 2010, for the 1,300th anniversary of the move. It is a reconstruction and says so: the timber, tile and pigment are new, the elevation is an interpretation drawn from excavation and from comparable buildings, and the eighth-century fabric is the ground beneath it. It is open to visitors, and the platform gives the clearest sense available of how far the enclosure ran.

📸 Cover: the First Daigokuden as reconstructed in 2010, not an original building; photograph by Taro Nagoya, CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons