Landmarks, and the story inside them

Shah Jahan built it for Mumtaz Mahal. Its design was inspired by Jag Mandir Palace in Udaipur, and the marble shifts tone with the light through the day.

The Harmandir Sahib sits in the middle of a sacred pool, open on all four sides. Its community kitchen serves free meals to everyone who comes, every day.

Residence of Mughal emperors for 200 years, it was originally built in white limestone before the red sandstone facing we see today.

Its screened lattice windows let royal women watch the street festivals below without being seen, while the airflow cooled the interior.

Built on a hilltop above Leh, it holds relics enshrined by the Dalai Lama and looks out over one of the highest inhabited valleys on earth.

Pilgrims gather at this ghat each evening for the Ganga aarti, floating lamps downstream as the river enters the plains.

The slender granite columns of the Vittala temple complex produce musical tones when struck, carved from single blocks of stone.

A narrow-gauge line that loops and zigzags its way up to Darjeeling, and one of India's UNESCO-listed mountain railways.

Workers began at the cliff top and cut downward to release an entire temple from the rock. There was no way to correct a mistake.

The temple is shaped as the sun god's chariot, with 24 carved wheels that function as sundials.

The gopurams are covered in sculpted deities and guardians, repainted by hand roughly every twelve years.

A stepwell inverted into a sculpted temple, descending level by level toward the water. It appears on the ₹100 note.

Pallava sculptors worked whole shrines out of single granite boulders on this shoreline, where salt wind has been polishing them ever since.

A collection of masonry astronomical instruments built to track the sun, stars and time with the naked eye.

The Golconda mines produced the Koh-i-Noor. A clap at the fort gate still carries up to the hilltop pavilion.