Sho-so in （正倉院）

If your lovely partner died, how wod you deal with his/her belongings?

If you loved his/her so much, you may keep them on your hand.
If you didn't love, then you may throw them away.

In her case, it was a bit different. 

When her husband died, she donated all of his belongings to a temple, which her husband established.

The "she" is the Japan's imperial empress Kou-myo（光明皇后）, a wife of the 45th imperial emperor Shomu.（聖武天皇）.  When the emperor died in 756 AD, the empress decided to give the Shomu's mementos to Toudai-ji temple（東大寺）, known as a Buddhist temple with a big golden statue of Buddha.  The items, ranging from her husband's clothes, folding screens to his bed on which he had spent time with his wife, were stored in a traditional warehouse called "Sho-so in" （正倉院） in Nara. This is a historical origin of the treasury warehouse. 

For another information, the empress also donated some medicines there, which the husband had taken in hope of curing sick people in her nation. In history, she then established a hospital for citizens for the first time in Japan.

Official photography of Sho-so in. Retrieved on October 27, 2013 from http://www.kunaicho.go.jp/event/shosoin.html

Back to ther treasury warehouse, the empress attached a list scroll of the donated items called "Kokka-chinpou-cho" （国家珍宝帳: List of the Nation's Rare Treasures）to the items, and she confessed why she decided to donate the husband's items to the temple in the scroll. 

She wrote; "I'm broken in sight of the items". 

As long as she kept the belongings, she should see them, and she couldn't stop mourning for her husband's pass-away whenever she saw the belongings. As her conclusion to stop mourning,  she decided to move them away to a Buddhist temple where her husband spent his life as an emperor to establish being at prayer for his nation's peace.

Currently, Sho-so in doesn't store the Shomu's items only but also various treasures donated by various people, and reportedly the warehouse possess 9,000 items inside. That said, as Sho-so in are managed by the imperial household agency, a governmental office serving to the imperial family (Japan's royal family), people cannot enter into the warehouse and see the items in principle. 

It doesn't mean that we don't have any chances to see the items, however. In fact, Nara National Museum holds a special exhibition of Sho-so in's items every year, although the number of exhibitions are limited. (The museum's curator said that it would take them 130 years to exhibit the whole 9,000 items by holding the yearly exhibition program)  

This year's exhibition, the 65th occasion counting from the first program held in 1946 AD, started from October 26, 2013, and the finale is on November 11, 2013. It's officially explained that the exhibited items wouldn't be disclosed for next ten years at least, so we should wait for another ten years to see the same exhibitions as this year's.

The curator said that some of the items in Sho-so in cannot be duplicated perfectly in the current era even with our cutting-edge technology, so the national treasures are our legacy of ancestors' techniques. The techniques may have died but the souls may live in our heart.