Anrakuji Tenmangu Mausoleum

This is the burial site of Sugawara Michizane, the 9th-century scholar exiled to Dazaifu and later deified as Tenjin, the deity of learning. According to tradition, the ox drawing his funeral cart refused to move past this spot in 903, and his body was interred where the cart stopped. A Buddhist mausoleum, Anrakuji, was built over the grave in 905 — the institution that two decades later, in 919, became Dazaifu Tenmangū at the order of Emperor Daigo. The site sits roughly ten minutes' walk north of the main shrine, quieter than the Tenmangū crowds, with the Taikobashi-style stone bridge whose three sections represent past, present, and future.