Honmaru-goten Palace

The Honmaru-goten Palace features a low-slung, dark wood exterior with intricate, white-plastered gables that distinguish it from the rest of the Nijo Castle complex. Built for the Japanese imperial family, it remains one of the few surviving examples of domestic residence architecture from the late Edo period. When a fire destroyed the original palace in the mid-nineteenth century, workers transported the Katsura Palace outbuilding from the Kyoto Imperial Park to this site, reassembling it piece by piece to create the current structure.