The Taj Mahal: A Monument to Love
1653 · place
On the bank of the Yamuna river at Agra stands a white marble mausoleum built by an emperor for his wife. Mumtaz Mahal died in 1631 after the birth of her fourteenth child, and Shah Jahan, ruler of the Mughal empire, ordered a tomb for her that would have no equal. Work began the following year. The main building was finished in about a decade and the whole complex of gateway, mosque, guest house and garden after roughly twenty years.
Around twenty thousand workers and craftsmen were involved, drawn from across the empire and beyond, with the design usually credited to the architect Ustad Ahmad Lahauri. The marble came from Makrana in Rajasthan, carried by ox cart and elephant. Its surfaces are inlaid with flowers made from jasper, jade, turquoise, lapis and carnelian, cut so precisely that the joins cannot be felt with a fingertip, and passages from the Quran are set in black stone in letters that grow larger with height so that they appear the same size from the ground.
The plan is almost perfectly symmetrical, a garden divided into four parts by watercourses, with the tomb reflected in a long pool. The one deliberate break in the symmetry came later, when Shah Jahan himself was buried beside his wife, his cenotaph placed slightly off centre.
The Taj Mahal was added to the World Heritage list in 1983 and now receives millions of visitors a year. Air pollution has yellowed the marble, and conservators clean it periodically with a traditional clay pack. Its fame has made it a shorthand for India in a way that flattens it, but the building remains what it was meant to be, a monument to one person, built at the scale of an empire.