How the Taj Mahal was built, step by step: Shah Jahan, Mumtaz Mahal, 22 years, 20,000 workers, and the facts behind the legends

Architecture · 4 September 2026

The Taj Mahal at Agra was built between 1632 and 1653 by the Mughal emperor Shah Jahan as the tomb of his wife Mumtaz Mahal, who died in 1631 giving birth to their fourteenth child; the mausoleum itself was finished in about 1643 and the mosque, guest house, gardens and gateway by 1653. About 20,000 workers built it under a team of architects led by Ustad Ahmad Lahauri, on foundations of wells sunk into the bank of the Yamuna, as a core of brick faced with white marble from Makrana, 300 km away, hauled by a thousand elephants, and inlaid with 28 kinds of precious and semi-precious stone from across Asia. It cost about 32 million rupees, a figure usually converted to around a billion dollars today. Below: why it was built, each stage of the construction, who designed it, the numbers, and the stories, true and false, with the temples of India in the Ancient temples of the world collection and the tradition it came from in Islamic architecture.

Why: Shah Jahan and Mumtaz Mahal

Arjumand Banu Begum, called Mumtaz Mahal, "the chosen one of the palace", married Prince Khurram in 1612, and when he became the emperor Shah Jahan in 1628 she was his constant companion, travelling with him on campaign; she died on 17 June 1631 at Burhanpur in the Deccan, after a thirty-hour labour, and the court chronicles say the emperor went into a year of mourning, his beard turned white, and he gave up music and jewels. Her body was buried at Burhanpur and brought to Agra in December, to a garden on the river bought from the Raja of Amber, Jai Singh, in exchange for four mansions, and buried there while the tomb was designed. The Mughals had built garden tombs for a century, from Humayun's in Delhi to Akbar's at Sikandra, and Shah Jahan, the most architecturally ambitious of them, who also built the Red Fort of Delhi and the Peacock Throne, set out to surpass them all. His court poet wrote that the building was to be the throne of the Divine on earth; the Persian inscriptions on the gate are from the Quran and invite the soul to enter Paradise. Taj Mahal.

Step by step

• 1. The site, 1632. A bend of the Yamuna south-east of the Agra fort, where the river would form a mirror and the tomb could be seen from the emperor's palace. The ground was levelled, and a platform 50 m from the river built up above flood level.
• 2. Foundations. Along the river the builders sank a line of wells through the sand to firm ground, filled them with rubble, iron and lime mortar, and bridged them with arches to form a raft, the traditional Mughal well-foundation that keeps the tomb stable on wet ground and lets the water table rise and fall beneath it; the timber piles later found are ebony, which does not rot when wet.
• 3. The plinth. A base of red sandstone 300 m square carrying, at its centre, a marble platform 95 m square and 7 m high, on which the tomb stands, with a minaret at each corner.
• 4. The core. Walls and the double dome of brick set in lime mortar, the lower dome to form the ceiling of the chamber at 24 m, the outer bulb rising to 73 m, on a drum, with the brick masonry built up as a solid mass and the marble facing anchored to it with iron cramps.
• 5. The ramp. Instead of bamboo scaffolding, the builders raised an earthen ramp reported to be 15 km long from the town to the dome, up which oxen and elephants dragged the marble blocks on carts and rope hoists; contemporaries say the scaffold of brick around the tomb cost so much to remove that Shah Jahan let the people of Agra take it for free and it vanished overnight.
• 6. The marble. White Makrana marble from Rajasthan, slightly translucent, which shifts from pink at dawn to white at noon and gold in the moonlight; it was cut, carved with relief flowers and Quranic verse and fitted at the site.
• 7. The inlay. Pietra dura, called parchin kari: jasper from the Punjab, jade and crystal from China, turquoise from Tibet, lapis lazuli from Afghanistan, sapphires from Sri Lanka, carnelian from Arabia, cut into petals a millimetre thick and set into channels in the marble to form flowers, some with 60 pieces in one bloom.
• 8. The calligraphy. Verses of the Quran in black marble set into white, by Amanat Khan of Shiraz, the only artist allowed to sign the building; the letters are made larger the higher they go, so that from the ground the script reads at one size.
• 9. The finial, 1643. The gilded bronze finial, 9 m high, set on the dome, and the mausoleum complete; the inscriptions at the entrance are dated 1636 and 1637.
• 10. The complex, to 1653. The red sandstone mosque to the west and its mirror-image guest house to the east, the great gateway, the walled garden of four quarters (a charbagh) with its raised canal and lotus pool, the bazaar and caravanserais outside the gate that paid for the upkeep, and across the river the Moonlight Garden, from which the tomb was meant to be seen reflected.

Who designed and built it

The Mughal chronicles name no single architect, as was usual, and the design was the emperor's own to the extent that he took part in every decision; the chief architect is recorded as Ustad Ahmad Lahauri, a Persian from Lahore who also laid out the Red Fort of Delhi, and the Mughal historians also name Mir Abd-ul Karim and Makramat Khan as supervisors, Ismail Khan from Ottoman Turkey as the designer of the dome, Amanat Khan for the calligraphy, Chiranjilal of Delhi for the inlay and Muhammad Hanif as chief mason. The workforce of about 20,000, of stonecutters, masons, inlayers, carvers, calligraphers, dome-builders and labourers, came from across the empire and from Persia, Central Asia and Baghdad, and lived in a new town, Mumtazabad, now Taj Ganj, outside the south gate. A thousand elephants are said to have hauled the stone. The story that the tomb was designed by a European, the Venetian Geronimo Veroneo or the Frenchman Augustin de Bordeaux, was put about by 17th-century Europeans and has no support in any Mughal source or in the building, which is entirely within the Persian-Mughal tradition of Humayun's tomb.

The building

• Symmetry. The whole complex is bilaterally symmetrical about the canal, with the tomb at the far end rather than in the centre, so that the garden is a foreground; the only asymmetry is inside, where Shah Jahan's cenotaph was added beside his wife's, off-centre.
• Minarets. The four 40 m minarets lean outward by a few degrees, so that in an earthquake they would fall away from the tomb, and so that from below they appear vertical.
• The dome. A double dome in the Persian manner, the outer one 35 m high and 17 m in diameter, with the finial combining a crescent and a trident, Islamic and Hindu; four smaller domed kiosks (chhatris) around it.
• The chamber. An octagon with a marble screen of lattice (jali) carved from single slabs around the two cenotaphs, which are empty; the real graves are in a crypt below, at garden level, with the couple's faces turned toward Mecca. The chamber echoes for 28 seconds.
• Decoration. Almost no figures, in keeping with Islam: flowers, arabesques, calligraphy and abstract geometry, in relief and inlay, with the flowers of Kashmir and Persia, tulips, irises, lilies and poppies, rendered from botanical drawings brought by the Jesuits from Europe.
• Size. The tomb is 57 m square; the platform 95 m; the complex 580 by 300 m; the dome 73 m to the top of the finial, the height of a 22-storey building.

Cost, aftermath and today

Mughal accounts put the cost at 32 million rupees, at a time when a labourer earned a rupee or two a month, and the tomb's upkeep was assigned the revenue of thirty villages and the shops of the bazaar. Shah Jahan was deposed by his son Aurangzeb in 1658 and lived his last eight years a prisoner in the Agra fort, with a view of the tomb down the river, and was buried beside Mumtaz in 1666. In the 18th century the Jats of Bharatpur stripped the silver doors and the gold-embroidered canopy; in the 19th the British used the garden for balls and Lord William Bentinck is said, wrongly, to have planned to sell the marble, and Lord Curzon restored it in 1899–1908 and replaced the Mughal garden with lawns. UNESCO listed it in 1983. Acid rain from Agra's factories and the drying of the Yamuna now yellow the marble and threaten the foundations; the building is cleaned with a clay pack, coal industry is banned in the zone, and visitor numbers, around seven million a year, are capped in the tomb chamber. The Taj is closed on Fridays and open five nights a month around the full moon.

Versions and theories

• The black Taj. The French traveller Tavernier, who saw the Taj built, wrote that Shah Jahan meant to build his own tomb in black marble across the river, joined by a bridge, and that Aurangzeb's rebellion stopped it. Excavations of the Moonlight Garden in the 1990s found no black tomb, only the garden and a pool in which the white Taj reflects dark; most historians treat it as legend.
• The craftsmen's hands were cut off. A story told of many buildings, from Ivan the Terrible's St Basil's to the Taj; no Mughal or European source of the time mentions it, and the same craftsmen went on to build the Red Fort. False.
• It was a Hindu temple, "Tejo Mahalaya". The claim of P.N. Oak from 1965, that the Taj was a Shiva temple of the Rajputs, was dismissed by the Supreme Court of India in 2000 and by the Archaeological Survey; the firmans of Shah Jahan buying the land from Raja Jai Singh survive, and the building's dated inscriptions are of 1632–48.
• A European designed it. See above: a 17th-century European boast without evidence.
• The Taj is sinking or cracking. Cracks in the marble and a tilt of the minarets of a few centimetres were measured in the 1940s; the well foundations depend on the Yamuna, which now runs low, and engineers disagree about the danger. Monitoring has found no significant movement since the 1940s.
• Shah Jahan's cenotaph spoils the symmetry. True, and often taken as proof of the black Taj: had he been buried across the river the chamber would have kept its perfect balance.

The tomb's predecessors and cousins in the Muslim world, from Isfahan to Samarkand and the Alhambra, are in Islamic architecture; the Hindu temples of the same subcontinent, such as the Brihadisvara Temple and the Konark Sun Temple, are in the collection.

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