1870年代，西方人士到亞洲旅行的風氣漸興，部分旅行者留下參訪京都古寺的記錄。本文以四位身分不同的西方人士書寫作為主要研究材料。旅人分別為奧地利前外交官胡伯納（Joseph Alexander Hübner，1811－1892）、法國商人與文化界人士杜黑（Théodore Duret，1838－1927）、英國設計師卓瑟（Christopher Dresser，1834－1904），與英國海軍建築師瑞德（Edward James Reed，1830－1906）。他們的書籍出版之時，詳盡的日本旅行手冊尚未刊行，日本官方文物保護制度也尚未成立，更無日本美術史、文化史的系統編纂。這些以西方語言書寫的寺院參訪記錄，正足以讓我們觀察具悠久歷史的京都佛寺與其文物，於現代社會中意義轉化的最初歷程。這些來自異文化圈之人士觀覽古文物的經歷與心得，讓我們觀察到，日本寺院建築或宗教物件，在明治時代初期，快速地被納入西方觀者的知識脈絡中，成為不同文化背景的人們，基於對歷史的探求，或對美感感知的興趣而觀覽的對象。

It became popular for the Westerners to travel in Asia in the 1870s, and several travelogues recorded the experiences of the Westerners' visits of ancient temples in Kyoto. This paper studies four cases of travelling writings, respectively by Joseph Alexander Hübner (1811-1892), a former Austrian diplomat, Théodore Duret (1838-1927), a French merchant and a man of the cultural circle, Christopher Dresser (1834-1904), a British designer, and Edward James Reed (1830-1906), a British naval architect. When they wrote and published their books, there were neither handbooks for traveling in Japan nor books of Japanese art history or cultural history. Official policy of the Japanese government regarding the protection of ancient heritage has not been well established yet. These writings deserve attention because they demonstrate how the East Asian Buddhist temples were commented by the viewers from the Western World regarding the artifacts' transformation of their social and historical meaning in the early stage of the modern age. The specific ways in which the authors recorded their observations of the artifacts throughout their journeys illuminate how the Western viewers perceived Buddhist objects within their context of knowledge. In the early Meiji period, Buddhist temples in Kyoto experienced a rapid transformation when they became objects viewed with aesthetic or historical interest from peoples of different cultural backgrounds.