Sanchi

Ashoka built the first brick stupa here around 250 BCE, close to Vidisha where his wife Devi came from, and for the next thousand years Sanchi grew as a monastery hill, a place of study rather than the site of any event in the Buddha's life. The Great Stupa, enlarged in stone under the Shungas, is a hemisphere 36 metres across topped by a harmika and three-tiered umbrella, ringed by a railing and, at the four cardinal points, the toranas added by Satavahana patrons in the 1st century BCE. These gateways are the reason to come: three curved architraves stacked on two pillars, every surface carved with the Buddha's life shown without the Buddha, as footprints, an empty throne, a bodhi tree, a wheel, alongside elephants, yakshis and the war over the relics.

Walk clockwise, as pilgrims did, and let a guide read the panels. Around the hill stand Stupa 3, where relics of the disciples Sariputra and Maudgalyayana were found, Temple 17, a Gupta-period shrine that is among the earliest freestanding stone temples in India, the ruined Monastery 51 and the stump of an Ashokan pillar whose lion capital is in the site museum. Sanchi was abandoned by the 13th century, found by a British officer in 1818, and set in order by John Marshall between 1912 and 1919.

Vidisha's Heliodorus Pillar and the Gupta rock-cut Udayagiri caves with their colossal Varaha are 10 km away.