KURASHIKI HOTELS & TRAVEL GUIDE
Kurashiki
Hotels & Travel Guide including
Kurashiki
sights, Kurashiki pictures and Kurashiki
hotels (Save up to 70% on Kurashiki hotels reservations).
Kurashiki (倉敷市; -shi) is a historic city located in
the west of Okayama Prefecture, in the Chugoku
region of Japan, sitting
on the Takahashi River, on the coast of the Inland Sea.
As of 2003, the city has an estimated population of 433,477 and the
density of 1,450.14 persons per kmē. The total area is 298.92 kmē.
The city was founded on April 1, 1928.
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A quay with 19th century warehouses in Kurashiki, Japan
-
David Monniaux
Kurashiki is famous within Japan for a number of
reasons:
- Kurashiki is the home to Japan's first Western
art museum, the Ohara Museum of Art. Established in 1930 by
Magosaburu Ohara, it contains masterpieces by El Greco, Monet,
Matisse, Gauguin, and Renoir. The collection also has fine examples
of Asian and contemporary art. The museum itself is housed in a
neo-Classical building;
- Kurashiki University of Science and the Arts;
- The ancient merchant quarter, called the Bikan
historical area. This area of the city is surrounded by almost
unique examples of 17th century wooden warehouses called kura (倉)
painted white with traditional black tiles, along a canal framed
with weeping willows and filled with koi. The area is
extraordinarily picturesque, and is a popular tourist destination.
One of the city's former town halls was located in the Kurashiki
Kan, an impressive European style building constructed in 1917.
A Tivoli theme park was built in 1998, based on the
theme park of the same name in Copenhagen, and is popular with local
Japanese.
(Article based on
Wikipedia article and used under the
GNU Free Documentation License)
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