Kyoto

For eleven centuries Kyoto was the seat of emperors, and the city has never quite surrendered the habit of majesty. Within its quiet grid lie some two thousand temples and gardens, each holding a different register of silence — the raked gravel of Ryōan-ji, the moss of Saihō-ji, the vermilion gates of Fushimi Inari climbing into cedar forest. Geiko still pass at dusk through Gion's lantern light. The world's most discerning travellers come here not to see but to be slowed: tea poured correctly, a garden viewed from the right cushion, a maple framed by a window built four hundred years ago for exactly that purpose.

From Tokyo, the most graceful approach is the Nozomi Shinkansen — a little over two hours in the hush of the Green Car, your chauffeur escorting you to the platform at Tokyo Station while a second, white-gloved colleague waits at Kyoto Station's gates. Those who prefer the road take the Tomei and Shin-Tomei Expressways, joining the Meishin past the southern shore of Lake Biwa: some five unhurried hours in the Lexus LM, rear seats reclined, partition raised, green tea poured above Suruga Bay. Doors open of their own accord; luggage is never touched twice. However you arrive, the transition is seamless — Kyoto begins not at the city limits but the moment you are seated.

Stay at Tawaraya, the three-hundred-year-old ryokan whose guest book reads like the century's history, or amid the forest gardens of Aman Kyoto in Takagamine, beneath Hidari Daimonji. Dine at Kikunoi in Higashiyama, where kaiseki follows the calendar week by week, or at Hyōtei, which has fed travellers beside the path to Nanzen-ji for more than four hundred years. In November, ask your chauffeur for Tōfuku-ji's maples at opening hour; in April, the weeping cherry of Maruyama Park after dinner. Dawn at Fushimi Inari, before the first visitors, belongs entirely to you. Kyoto does not perform. It permits.