The white marble mausoleum on the Yamuna river at Agra, built between roughly 1632 and 1653 by the Mughal emperor Shah Jahan for his dead wife Mumtaz Mahal — the supreme monument of Mughal architecture, a perfectly proportioned tomb set in a four-part paradise garden, and the building that became the global symbol of love and of India itself.
It is the most famous tomb on earth, and it is a grave. A Mughal emperor raised it in white marble for the wife who died bearing his fourteenth child, and the building has become the world's shorthand for love. But look closely and the perfection is a kind of grief made permanent. Every line is balanced, every minaret answered by another, the whole vast complex held in flawless symmetry. There is only one thing out of place inside it: a second cenotaph, the emperor's own, set off-center beside hers. Many read that asymmetry as a sign that his burial there was never part of the plan. The single imperfection in the most perfect building in the world is the man who built it.