A harvester walks amid undulating waves of tea plants in the mountainous Nara Prefecture in central Japan.

Located 23 miles (37 kilometers) south of Kyoto, Nara was Japan’s first real capital city, where artists, scholars, and statesmen began to develop an artistically and religiously rich civilization.

(Photo shot on assignment for, but not published in, “Kyoto and Nara: Keepers of Japan’s Past,” June 1976, National Geographic magazine)