Kurashiki Bikan Historical Quarter

The Bikan quarter is the old merchant centre of Kurashiki, built along the banks of the Kurashiki River. Its white-walled storehouses and town houses were selected as an Important Preservation District in 1979, covering thirteen and a half hectares, since extended to fifteen.

Kurashiki became shogunal land in 1642 and had a magistrate placed in it. New fields were opened around the town, which grew into the collecting point for goods shipped along the river and the centre of the new farmland. The merchants who prospered on that trade built the houses that still line the water; most of the buildings standing today follow the great merchant houses of the late eighteenth century.

The magistrate's office was abolished in 1868, and with the changes of the Meiji Restoration the old traffic fell away.

The buildings are mostly town houses with plastered walls and heavy tiled roofs, and storehouses built in the same way, their walls patterned with squares of tile set in raised plaster. A few Western-style buildings went up after 1868 among them, including the former town hall and an art museum.

Willows line the river, and flat-bottomed boats of the kind that once carried goods take passengers along it. After dark the quarter is lit and the white walls show in the water.

Kurashiki began protecting the quarter before most of Japan thought to. The town passed its own preservation ordinance in 1968, seven years before the national system for such districts existed, and added further ordinances in 1978 and 2000. The national selection followed in 1979.