Bhubaneswar

Bhubaneswar is a working city built around an extraordinary open-air archive of temple building. Between the seventh and thirteenth centuries the Shailodbhavas, Somavamshis and Eastern Gangas raised shrine after shrine here, and roughly 500 remain, most of them clustered in the old town near the Bindusagar tank. Follow them chronologically and you watch a style being invented: the modest Parasurameswara of about 650 CE with its latticed windows and Shiva panels; the tenth-century Mukteshwara, small enough to walk around in a minute and the most perfectly finished of them all, entered through a carved torana arch with reclining figures; the Rajarani of the eleventh century, whose tower is clustered with miniature spires and whose walls carry the eight dikpalas; and finally Lingaraja, 55 metres of sandstone completed around 1100, still an active temple whose compound non-Hindus view from a platform on the outer wall.

Two other layers sit around this. On the twin hills of Udayagiri and Khandagiri, Jain monks cut cells into the rock in the second century BCE under King Kharavela, whose Hathigumpha inscription is a key document of early Indian history, and Rani Gumpha's carved verandahs are worth an hour. Eight kilometres south at Dhauli, Ashoka's rock edict marks the battlefield where the Kalinga war turned him from conquest, beneath a white peace pagoda built with Japanese help in 1972.