Nalanda

Nalanda Mahavihara was founded under the Gupta emperor Kumaragupta I in the fifth century CE and endured for roughly 700 years, supported by kings from Harsha to the Palas. At its height it housed several thousand monks and teachers in a planned campus of monasteries facing a row of temples across a central avenue, with a library complex called Dharmaganja said to have run to three buildings, one of them nine storeys high. The Chinese pilgrim Xuanzang studied here in the 630s and left the description on which most of our knowledge rests; his compatriot Yijing followed a generation later.

The site was destroyed around 1193 during Bakhtiyar Khilji's campaign in Magadha and lay buried until Alexander Cunningham identified it in the 1860s. Walking the excavation today, you move down a paved lane with monastery ruins on the right, each a square courtyard ringed by monks' cells with stone beds and niches for lamps, and temple platforms on the left. The great Stupa of Sariputta at Temple Site 3 rises in tiers of brick, its lower levels carrying Gupta stucco panels of Buddhas and bodhisattvas, and from its top the whole plan of the university opens out.

The archaeological museum across the road holds bronzes, seals bearing the university's name, and two colossal terracotta jars.