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During his trip to Japan in 1892, Alfred Parsons visited the temple of Kwannon in the village of Hase-Dera, close to Nara, a city south of Kyoto and Osaka. Since antiquity, Hase had been considered an abode of dead souls, a belief which led, in the year 686, to the building of a temple. In turn, the temple, housing a monumental gilded idol, became one of the essential stops, first on pilgrimages and then on tourist trails. But as Parsons himself explained, there was another, botanical, reason for visiting the temple:
'On my return journey to Nara I made a halt at Hase to see the tree peonies which grow by the steps of the big temple of Kwannon, a sight well worth seeing, and again the heavy rains kept me almost idle for some days.'
(Watercolours illustrating Landscapes and Flowers in Japan, Fine Art Society, 1893, page 6)
Three years later, he described this visit in greater detail:
'There were still some hours of daylight left after I had settled down in my quarters [in Hase, in the Valley of Yamato], so I wandered up the street and climbed the long flight of steps to the great temple of Kwannon.
On each side of the steps small beds were built up, and in these the paeonies grew, and their big flowers, ranging in colour from white to dark purple, glowed in the afternoon light against a background of gray stone lanterns. The temple is built on a hill-side, like Ni-gwatsu-do at Nara and many other Buddhist temples, and it consists of a wide veranda filled with incense-burners and votive pictures and bronze lanterns, and of an inner sanctuary. Across the entrance to this stands an altar, and over it an opening in the dark purple curtains allows a glimpse of the great golden figure of Kwannon, nearly thirty feet high, her face, with its expression of calm beneficence, only just distinguishable by the light of a few dim lamps in the gloom of the windowless shrine. Behind this main temple there are various other buildings, priests' houses and such like, and a little pond for the sacred tortoises.'
(Alfred Parsons, Notes in Japan, London: Osgood, Mcilvaine & Co, 1896, pages 33-34)
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