Kinkaku-ji, the Golden Pavilion

You enter through the Sōmon gate, turn a corner, and the pavilion is in front of you across the Kyōko-chi, the mirror pond — which is the view, and it arrives in the first ninety seconds. The path then runs behind the pavilion, past the Ginga-sen spring and the Anmintaku pond, up a slope past the Sekkatei tea house and out through the shop. You cannot enter the pavilion, you cannot approach it beyond the fence, and you cannot walk the route backwards.

The three storeys are three architectures stacked: a Heian-style residential floor at the bottom, a samurai-style hall above it, and a Chinese Zen hall at the top, the upper two sheathed in gold leaf with a bronze phoenix on the roof. That is the payload of the visit, and once you have seen it from the two viewpoints on the pond there is not much more the site offers.

1950, and why the building is younger than the tourists

The pavilion standing today dates from 1955. In July 1950 a novice monk burned the original to the ground, an act Yukio Mishima turned into the novel The Temple of the Golden Pavilion. The reconstruction followed the original form, and the gold leaf was renewed in 1987 in a considerably thicker application than the medieval one — which is why photographs from before and after look like different buildings.

None of this is explained on site in English, and it is the main thing a guide adds.

The order to walk it in

Arrive at 09:00 and the pond is calm and the reflection is clean; by 10:30 the front viewpoint is three people deep. In winter the site sells the picture everyone wants — snow on the roof — and the temple stays open in it. The path is gravel and gentle, with one short slope, and takes wheelchairs and pushchairs without difficulty apart from that slope.

There is no version of this visit that fills a morning on its own, and pretending otherwise is how people end up with an hour to kill in the north-west of the city at half past ten. The three routings below are the ones that work.

Whichever you take, arrive at the 09:00 opening. The pond is calm, the reflection is clean and the front viewpoint is passable; by 10:30 it is three people deep, and because the path is one-way and narrow at the water the site clogs rather than queues. The last hour before the 17:00 close is the other clear window.

Everything stops at Kinkakuji-michi, a couple of minutes' walk from the gate. The routes below are the temple's own published list, with journey times from our own trips and the flat city-bus fare of $1.44 (¥230) applying to each of them.

A single city bus ride is a flat $1.44 (¥230), so a return from Kyoto Station plus one more journey brings the $6.88 (¥1,100) Subway & Bus 1-day pass within reach — this is exactly the kind of day it was designed for. Note that the subway does not come here: the nearest station, Kitaoji, is a bus ride away in its own right.

Ryoan-ji is fifteen minutes away by bus and is the opposite experience: $3.75 (¥600) for fifteen rocks in raked gravel, which people either sit with for an hour or leave in five minutes. Ninna-ji, a further ten minutes on, is a vast temple complex with a five-storey pagoda and, in April, the late-blooming Omuro cherries. Together the three make a coherent half day that ends at about 13:00 — and the walk between Ryoan-ji and Ninna-ji, down the Kinukake-no-michi, is a pleasant twenty minutes rather than a bus ride.

The pairing to avoid is Kinkaku-ji with Arashiyama on the same morning: they look close on a map and the bus between them is slow enough to eat the time you saved.

• Kinkaku-ji 09:00, Ryoan-ji 10:00, Ninna-ji 11:15 — the classic north-west morning
• Kinkaku-ji plus the 204 bus east to Ginkaku-ji and the Philosopher's Path — a full day, and the two pavilions in one
• Kinkaku-ji as the first stop of a bus tour that carries on to Kiyomizu-dera, which is what most coach itineraries do

- The temple's own website does not mention the fire. Its history page runs from the Saionji estate of 1224 through Yoshimitsu to the 1994 UNESCO inscription without a word about 1950 — which is why the single most interesting fact on the site reaches almost nobody who visits it. (shokoku-ji.jp) - It was never built as a temple. Yoshimitsu began it in 1397 as a retirement palace, and it became Rokuon-ji only after his death in 1408, under the terms of his will. Rokuon-ji is still its formal name; Kinkaku-ji is a nickname for one building.

(shokoku-ji.jp) - The ground was famous two centuries before he arrived. The Saionji family dedicated a temple here in 1224 and the poet Fujiwara Teika recorded a visit in 1225 — this was a celebrated view long before there was any gold on it. (shokoku-ji.jp) - The arson has a name and an hour. Hayashi Shoken, a 22-year-old novice, set the fire at 2:30 in the morning on 2 July 1950 and then attempted suicide; the pavilion was rebuilt by 1955. (Wikipedia, Kinkaku-ji) - The gold you see is heavier than the gold Yoshimitsu paid for. The coating was replaced between 1986 and 1987 with about twenty kilograms of new leaf, in a much thicker application than the medieval one — the reason photographs taken twenty years apart look like two different buildings.

(Wikipedia, Kinkaku-ji)

The temple opens at 09:00 and the reflection is at its best in the first hour, so the sensible shape is to start here, carry on to Ryoan-ji and Ninna-ji, and be back in the centre for lunch. Slotting it into the middle of a day means two long bus rides through the city, which is the single most common way visitors lose an afternoon in Kyoto.

The two-day itinerary puts Kinkaku-ji on the western morning with Arashiyama in the afternoon; the three-day one gives the north-west its own half day, which is what it deserves.