One of Kyushu’s principal cities, Nagasaki has a long history of contact with mainland China and the West – a fact vividly reflected in its cosmopolitan architecture. Chinese Taoist temples, Confucian shrines and Catholic churches punctuate a skyline which had to be largely reconstructed after 1945, when an American nuclear attack killed an estimated 65,000 people here. The tragedy is commemorated in Nagasaki’s Atomic Bomb Museum, whose most poignant exhibit is a clock stuck at 11:02 am, the precise moment of the explosion.