The Japanese Teahouse: A Gift of 1972
Why is it significant?
Stop by the water and look across to the little island: a low wooden house with paper screens and a gently curving roof, surrounded by carefully shaped pines and stones. A small bridge leads over. After the stone giant you just left, this feels like someone lowered their voice.
Key Facts
| Place | The Japanese Teahouse: A Gift of 1972 |
|---|---|
| Address | Englischer Garten, 80539 München, Germany |
| Geo Coordinates | 48.14540, 11.58590 |
| Part of Walk | River and Meadow: Munich's Isar, the Angel of Peace & the English Garden |
| Generated | Generated |
Stop by the water and look across to the little island: a low wooden house with paper screens and a gently curving roof, surrounded by carefully shaped pines and stones. A small bridge leads over. After the stone giant you just left, this feels like someone lowered their voice.
This is the Japanese Teahouse, called Kanshoan, and it was built in 1972, the year Munich hosted the Olympic Games. It was connected with the Urasenke school of tea from Kyoto, one of the great traditions of the Japanese tea ceremony. At certain times, tea masters still perform the ceremony here: every gesture prescribed, every bowl turned just so, a ritual of stillness in the middle of a busy city park.
The year 1972 carries a heavy memory in Munich. The Olympic Games were meant to show a new, open, democratic Germany, and in many ways they did. But they are also remembered for the attack by Palestinian terrorists on the Israeli team, in which eleven Israeli athletes and coaches were murdered, along with a West German police officer. This quiet house belongs to the hopeful side of that summer.
The setting tells a second story too. The water around the island is part of the network of streams that run through the English Garden, all of it fed by the Isar. The Eisbach, the ice brook, flows nearby, cold and fast enough to carry swimmers who are foolish enough to jump in. The garden was designed so that water would always be close: you hear it before you see it.
Japanese gardens and English landscape gardens share one secret: both pretend to be natural, and both are entirely designed. Every pine and every bend of the stream here was placed by someone. Now continue north along the path, and the trees will open onto a huge, sunny meadow.