A fire has destroyed all the main structures of Shuri Castle, a Unesco World Heritage site on Japan's southern island of Okinawa, BBC reports.
Firefighters battled the flames for more than 10 hours, extinguishing them by Thursday afternoon. No injuries have been reported so far.
The wooden castle, built 500 years ago, was almost completely destroyed during World War Two.
The current structure is a reconstruction.
The castle served as a campus for Okinawa's largest public university until the 1970s, and has been a popular tourist attraction since.