Sublime

I found my new department located in another abandoned temple – this time much older than Alfred Mond’s shrine to the Imperial Chemical Industries. The Old Admiralty had been purpose-built as the headquarters of the British Navy in 1703. Its courtyard walls were topped with leaping dolphins, the ceilings decorated with plaster anchors, and the inte

Hideyoshi’s supremacy, followed by the systematic repression of daimyo autonomy by Ieyasu (1524–1616), the first Tokugawa shogun, spelled the gradual end of Japan’s ‘Christian century’ and the brief era of openness in overseas trade.