Taj Mahal

The Taj Mahal is a white marble mausoleum on the south bank of the Yamuna River at Agra, in northern India. It was commissioned in 1631 by Shah Jahan, fifth emperor of the Mughal Empire, as a tomb for his wife Mumtaz Mahal, and the whole complex of gardens, gateways, a mosque and a guest hall took more than two decades to finish. It is often regarded as the finest achievement of Mughal architecture.

Mumtaz Mahal died on 17 June 1631 while giving birth to her fourteenth child. The emperor is said to have withdrawn from government for a week and to have given up music and fine clothes for two years. The land chosen for her tomb, just south of Agra, had belonged to Raja Jai Singh I, who gave it up and received a large palace in the middle of the city in exchange.

Work began in 1632. Builders levelled and raised the riverside ground, and a long earthen ramp, said to have stretched about 15 kilometres, carried materials to the site. More than 20,000 craftsmen and labourers took part under the court architect Ustad Ahmad Lahori, alongside specialists in dome design, calligraphy, inlay and masonry, some of them from Persia and the Ottoman lands. The first memorial ceremony was held in the unfinished tomb in February 1643, on the twelfth anniversary of the empress's death. The mausoleum itself was finished in 1648 and the surrounding buildings around 1653.

The tomb is faced in white marble from Makrana in Rajasthan, while the outer buildings use red sandstone. The marble is inlaid with semi-precious stones, twenty-eight kinds in all, some brought from as far as China, Tibet, Afghanistan, Sri Lanka and Arabia. The building stands on a square plinth with sides of about 95 metres and reaches a total height of about 73 metres. Four minarets of roughly 40 metres frame it; they lean very slightly outwards, so that if one fell it would fall away from the tomb. In front lies a formal charbagh, a garden divided into quarters by water channels, with a central pool.

The complex needed attention almost at once. In 1652 the prince Aurangzeb wrote to his father that the dome, the mosque and the assembly hall had leaked during the monsoon. Six years later Aurangzeb seized the throne and confined Shah Jahan to Agra Fort, from where the old emperor could see the tomb across the river. When Shah Jahan died in 1666 he was buried beside Mumtaz Mahal.

As Mughal authority weakened in the eighteenth century, Agra was fought over by regional powers. The Jat rulers of Bharatpur raided the city and stripped the tomb of valuables, including chandeliers, a screen of gold and silver, and gold from the finial. By the late nineteenth century, when the area was under the British Raj, parts of the buildings were in poor condition. The viceroy Lord Curzon ordered a restoration that was completed in 1908; it also added a large lamp to the inner chamber and replaced the original planting with lawns in the English manner.

During the Second World War, in 1942, the government covered the building with scaffolding to make it harder to identify from the air, and did so again during the wars with Pakistan in 1965 and 1971. Since independence the Archaeological Survey of India has looked after the monument. UNESCO inscribed it on the World Heritage List in 1983, and in 2007 it was among the winners of an international poll to choose "New 7 Wonders of the World".

Air pollution has slowly turned the white marble yellowish-brown. Acid rain and emissions from industry, including an oil refinery at Mathura, have been blamed. Following a 1997 ruling by the Supreme Court of India, authorities created the Taj Trapezium Zone, an area of about 10,400 square kilometres with strict emission limits. Restorers have applied clay packs to draw out stains, and there have been concerns that falling groundwater along the Yamuna could affect the foundations. Around five million people visited in the year 2022 to 2023, making it one of the most visited monuments in India.