Heian Japan

Heian Japan takes its name from Heian-kyo, the City of Peace, where Emperor Kanmu fixed his capital in 794 and where the imperial court would remain for a thousand years. The early Heian state was the peak of Chinese-style government in Japan: law codes, a census-based tax system, and embassies that crossed to Tang China in 804 and 838, bringing back the Tendai and Shingon forms of Buddhism taught by Saicho and Kukai. After the missions were abandoned in 894, court culture turned inward and produced a distinctly Japanese art: the kana syllabaries that let women of the palace write in their own tongue, the Pillow Book, and Murasaki Shikibu's Tale of Genji. Real power, however, drained from the emperors first to the Fujiwara regents who married their daughters into the throne, then to retired emperors ruling from cloisters, and finally to the provincial warriors the court had hired to fight its rebels. The Taira ascendancy collapsed when Minamoto no Yoritomo destroyed them in the Genpei War, and his appointment in 1185 to military authority over the provinces marks the conventional close of the period. Aristocratic Heian left behind the great temples of Kyoto, the manorial order that would feed the samurai age, and a literature still read as Japan's classical canon.