A castle being restored since 1965?! these people aren't in a hurry, huh?
I mean, the real things often took quite a long time to build as well.
Not really, military fortifications generally needed to get to a defensible state pretty fast after all - lest whoever they were designed against come throw sand in the gears. Examples of enemy spoiling raids on construction sites aren't uncommon in histories of volatile regions (eg. the Levant during the Crusades). For example Rhuddlan Castle in Wales was fully finished in five years (1277-1282), and its concurrent "sister" Flint already had its core defense works in place by the end of its first year of construction. Full completion might well take longer ofc, particularly if the site was large, complex and/or involved a lot of stonework (as was universal of European fortifications from 12th century onwards); for example the rightly famous Krak des Chevaliers (in what is now western Syria) took 28 years to finish. Naturally the builder's resources factored heavily - the king of a major realm or a great prince (or a powerful city-state) could obviously mobilise money and labour on an entirely different scale and ambition than some minor baron or knight (or small town).
To put this in perspective compare a standout example of a major civilian construction project, the Notre-Dame de Paris which began in 1163 and was declared finished in 1345 - 182 years later... with a fair bit of expansion and modernisation done thereafter too. This sort of timeframe was pretty typical of cathedrals btw. For another rather more down-to-earth example the Uffizi complex in Florence (originally built to house elements of the civic bureaucracy, hence the name - Italian for "offices") took 21 years.
Japanese fortresses by way of comparison were essentially just sophisticated but relatively light palisades and walls atop massive stone-faced rammed-earth ramparts (rather similar to their Chinese peers), and relatively quick to throw up compared to the extensive and tall masonry walls of the European system; eg. Matsue Castle was apparently finished in just four years.
last edited at May 1, 2021 2:38PM