The Taj Mahal is an ivory-white marble mausoleum located on the right bank of the Yamuna River in Agra, Uttar Pradesh, India. In 1631, the fifth Mughal emperor, Shah Jahan (r. 1628-1658), commissioned it to house Mumtaz Mahal’s tomb, as well as his own. The tomb is the focal point of a 17-hectare (42-acre) complex that includes a mosque and a guest house. It is set in formal gardens bounded on three sides by a crenelated wall.

The Taj Mahal, an enormous white marble mausoleum built in Agra between 1631 and 1648 by Mughal Emperor Shah Jahan, is India’s crown jewel of Muslim art and one of the world’s most admired masterpieces. Its popularity is undoubtedly due in part to the changing circumstances surrounding its construction.

Shah Jahan built this funerary mosque to honour his favourite wife, Mumtaz Mahal, who died in 1631. The monument, begun in 1632 and completed in 1648, is said to have been built by an international team of several thousand masons, marble workers, mosaicists, and decorators working under the orders of the emperor’s architect, Ustad Ahmad Lahori.

This funerary monument, bounded by four isolated minarets and situated on the right bank of the Yamuna in a vast Mogul Garden of approximately 17 ha, reigns with its octagonal structure capped by a bulbous dome through the crisscross of open perspectives offered by alleys or basins of water. The rigour of a perfect elevation of astonishing graphic purity is disguised and almost contradicted by the scintillation of a fairy-like decor in which the main building material, white marble, brings out and scintillates the floral arabesques, decorative bands, and calligraphic inscriptions incrusted in polychromatic pietra dura.

The materials were brought in from all over India and Central Asia, including white Makrana marble from Jodhpur. The precious stones used in the inlay came from Baghdad, Punjab, Egypt, Russia, Golconda, China, Afghanistan, Ceylon, the Indian Ocean, and Persia. The distinctive Mughal style incorporates elements and styles from Persian, Central Asian, and Islamic architecture.