Page:Brinkley - Japan - Volume 2.djvu/78

 colours played heavenly music. As for the "Flower Palace" of the Shōgun, it cost six hundred thousand pieces of gold (about a million pounds sterling.) The tiles of its roof were like jewels or precious metals. It defies description. In the Takakura Palace resided the mother of the Shōgun and his wife. A single door cost as much as twenty thousand pieces of gold (£32,000). In the eastern part of the city, stood the Karasu-maru Palace, built by Yoshimasa during his youth. It was scarcely less magnificent. Then there was the Fujiwara Palace of Sanjo, where the mother of the late Shōgun was born. All the resources of human intellect had been employed to adorn it. At Hino and Hirohashi were mansions out of which the mother of the present Shōgun came. They were full of jewels and precious objects. (The writer then enumerates the palaces of twenty-seven noble families.) Even men that made medicine and fortune-telling their profession, and petty officials like secretaries, had stately residences. There were some two hundred of such buildings, constructed entirely of white pine and having four-post gates (i. e. gates with flank entrances for persons of inferior rank). Then there were a hundred provincial nobles, great and small, each of whom had a stately residence, so that there were altogether from six to seven thousand houses of a fine type in the capital.

The writer then devotes pages to enumerating the great temples that stood in the city and its suburbs. Of one he says that it was "bathed in blossoms as a mountain is in clouds," and that "in the rays of the setting sun the roof glowed like gold," while "every breath of air wafted around the perfume of flowers." Of another—Shō-kaku-ji, which Yoshimitsu built—he affirms