ABSTRACT
Perhaps no country on earth except Japan can boast a wooden structure that has braved the winters of over one thousand years. It is said that there are no less than thirty such within this island empire, and one of the most remarkable of these monuments of the nation's past is the Shōsōin, the famous Imperial repository of art and history at Nara, the ancient capital of the Empire. It has stood on its present site behind the Daibutsu Hall of the Tōdaiji for more than eleven centuries.
