Humayun's Tomb

You walk through a high red gateway, and all at once a great garden opens in front of you. Straight stone paths cross it from end to end, lined with long, shallow channels of water. At the far side stands a vast building of red stone, crowned with a single white dome that catches the afternoon light. Birds call from the trees. The traffic of the modern city fades to a distant, steady hum.

This is the tomb of Humayun, the second emperor of the Mughal line. His was a difficult reign. He ruled, then lost his throne to a rival, spent long years in exile, and at last won his empire back, only to die soon after in 1556. He fell on the stone steps of his library and never recovered. His death was sudden, and his family wished to honor him properly.

The tomb was the idea of his devoted wife. Her name was Bega Begum, though she is often called Haji Begum, for she had made the long and dangerous pilgrimage to Mecca. After the emperor died, she gave herself fully to the task of building a resting place worthy of him. Work began in 1558, just two years after his death, with funds she largely provided herself.

To design it, she chose a gifted Persian architect named Mirak Mirza Ghiyas. He brought with him the ideas of his homeland, drawn from the gardens, domes, and tiled tombs of Persia. The great building was completed around 1570. It cost an enormous sum for its day, and the grieving widow is said to have paid much of that cost from her own treasury.

This was the first true garden-tomb ever built on the Indian subcontinent. The garden around it is divided into four equal squares by the crossing walkways and water channels. This careful pattern is called the char bagh, which means simply four gardens. For many people of the faith, a green and watered garden like this was meant to suggest the gardens of paradise itself.

The tomb rests upon a wide, raised platform of stone. Look at it from a distance, and notice how perfectly balanced the whole design is. Each side mirrors the others almost exactly. Arched openings, some large and some small, repeat in steady rhythm across the deep red sandstone walls. Bands and outlines of white marble trace the edges of the arches in clean, bright lines.

Above the central structure rises a graceful double dome of white marble. It is built as two separate shells, one set inside the other. The tall outer shell gives the dome its proud and soaring height, seen from far across the garden. The lower inner shell caps the chamber within. This clever idea was copied and refined in many later Mughal buildings.

Step inside, and the air turns suddenly cool and quiet. The central chamber is plain, high, and almost bare. A single carved stone marker stands at its heart, set above the place where the emperor truly lies, in a chamber below. Daylight enters only through screens of finely carved stone, falling across the floor in soft, shifting patterns of light and shadow.

Humayun does not rest here alone. Over the long years that followed, many members of the royal family were laid to rest within these same walls and chambers. For this reason, people sometimes call the building the dormitory of the Mughals. More than a hundred graves, large and small, are said to lie throughout the structure, each one marked by simple stone.

This single building taught the Mughal builders a great deal. Its balance, its formal garden, and its high central dome all pointed the way forward for the architects who came later. About eighty years afterward, those same lessons reached their full height in the famous Taj Mahal at Agra. You can clearly see the family resemblance in the white dome rising above you.

In 1993, the tomb was named a World Heritage Site, recognized for its beauty and its importance. In the years that followed, patient teams carried out careful work to restore the gardens and repair the long water channels. Today the lawns are green and trimmed once more, and the channels can again hold flowing water, much as they did when the tomb was newly built.

Walk slowly back along the central path, and turn for one last look. The red walls seem to glow a little warmer as the day grows late. The white dome holds the wide sky steady above it. A man built an empire, lost it entirely, and won it back again. Here, at last, he rests in peace, in a garden raised by someone who truly loved him.