The world's most famous monument to love arose from a deathbed promise and a sultan's unbearable grief. The Taj Mahal is known to the world as an architectural marvel, but to one man, it was as testimony to the extraordinary depths of his devotion.
✦
In the pale light of a monsoon dawn in 1631, Mumtaz Mahal, the beloved third wife of Emperor Shah Jahan, drew her final breaths in a military encampment in Burhanpur.
She had accompanied her husband, as she always did, on a military campaign despite being heavily pregnant with their fourteenth child. The birth was difficult and lengthy. By the time the royal physicians were summoned, it was too late.
As life slipped away, she extracted a promise from her devastated husband: to build her a mausoleum more beautiful than any the world had seen.
Shah Jahan's grief consumed him entirely. For a week, he refused food and emerged from seclusion with his beard turned white, his back bent as though decades had passed in mere days. This emperor who had commissioned the spectacular Peacock Throne, who had rebuilt much of the Red Fort in Delhi, now channeled all his days into fulfilling his promise. Nothing would be too extravagant, no detail too small to escape his attention.
The monument would need to be perfect — as perfect as his love had been.
The emperor rejected hundreds of designs before approving the vision that would become the Taj Mahal.
Twenty thousand workers were summoned from across India, Persia, and the Ottoman Empire. Architects, calligraphers, stonecutters, and inlay specialists worked for two decades under his exacting gaze. The white marble was hauled by a thousand elephants from quarries over 200 miles away. Jade came from China, turquoise from Tibet, lapis lazuli from Afghanistan, sapphire from Sri Lanka, and carnelian from Arabia—all to adorn his beloved's final resting place.
The mausoleum rose on the banks of the Yamuna River, its foundations sunk deep to prevent shifting in the soft riverbank soil. Its pure white dome, rising 240 feet above the gardens, was designed to appear to float above the structure—ethereal, like the memory of Mumtaz herself.
Shah Jahan would spend hours gazing at the reflecting pools, watching how the monument changed colour throughout the day—rosy in the morning light, brilliant white at noon, golden as the sun set, and glowing silver in the moonlight.
