Taj Mahal
Taj Mahal Historical Timeline
History
Origins
Construction began in 1632, commissioned by the Mughal Emperor Shah Jahan as a mausoleum for his wife Mumtaz Mahal, who died giving birth to their fourteenth child. The main structure took until 1648 to complete, with the surrounding gardens and outbuildings finished roughly five years after that.
Turning points
The building process itself became part of the site's own legend -- an entire team of designers worked under the architect Ustad Ahmad Lahauri, and moving the huge marble blocks required a specially built pulley system pulled by teams of twenty or thirty oxen. The scaffolding was built of brick rather than the usual bamboo, and when the time came to take it down, Shah Jahan is said to have decreed that anyone could keep whatever bricks they removed -- leading local peasants to dismantle the entire scaffold themselves in a single night.
Influential people
Shah Jahan commissioned the mausoleum and shaped its symbolism as a monument to a specific loss, not just an imperial statement. Ustad Ahmad Lahauri is generally credited as the project's chief architect, though -- as with much Mughal court architecture -- the design likely emerged from a larger team working under him rather than one individual's vision alone.
Cultural evolution
Numerous myths have grown up around the Taj Mahal over the centuries -- that a matching "Black Taj" mausoleum was planned across the river (the supposed black marble evidence is actually just discolored white marble), and that Shah Jahan had the workmen who built it mutilated or killed to prevent them from ever building its equal. Neither has any real historical basis, but their persistence says something about the building's outsized hold on popular imagination.
Present-day significance
The Taj Mahal became a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1983 and was named one of the New7Wonders of the World in a global 2007 vote. It now draws an estimated 2-3 million visitors a year, including roughly 200,000 arriving from abroad, making it by a wide margin India's single most-visited monument.