Today I Learned That a Japanese Temple-Building Company Went Bankrupt After 1,400 Years

Brain-boggling sentencefrom a current story in the Atlantic:

In 2007 — after 1,429 years in business — the temple-construction company Kongo Gumi ran out of money andwas absorbed by a larger company.

That’s not a typo. Mediapost has more:

Kongo Gumi, the oldest independently owned company in the world, was founded in 578 A.D. as a Buddhist temple-building organization, subsidized in part by the Japanese government. …As the Japanese population grew, the need for more temples would follow. The com...