From Delhi: Private Taj Mahal, Agra Fort & Baby Taj Tour

Three tombs, and the order they were built in

This itinerary happens to run Mughal architecture in reverse. The Baby Taj was finished in 1628; the Taj Mahal was begun four years later. Seeing the smaller building shows you exactly where the larger one came from — the marble, the pietra dura, the jali screens, all of it appears at Itimad-ud-Daulah first, at a scale one family could afford.

And Agra Fort is where the man who commissioned the Taj died as a prisoner, looking at it.

Ask your guide to take them in that order if the timing allows. It changes the day.

Taj Mahal

Choose an early departure for the sunrise, when the marble runs grey to pink to white as the light comes over the Yamuna and the crowd is a fraction of the mid-morning one.

Shah Jahan began it in 1632, the year after Mumtaz Mahal died bearing their fourteenth child. Twenty thousand workers, twenty-two years, marble hauled 400 km from Makrana.

The calligraphy cut in increasing sizes so it reads the same height from the ground; the pietra dura of up to sixty stones per flower; the four minarets tilted outward so an earthquake would take them clear of the tomb; and Shah Jahan's own cenotaph, the only object in the building set off the central axis.

Agra Fort

Akbar's red sandstone city of 1565, Shah Jahan's marble within it, and the Musamman Burj.

Itimad-ud-Daulah

Nur Jahan built it for her father between 1622 and 1628: the first entirely marble Mughal building and the first in India to use pietra dura. More densely inlaid than the Taj, and nearly always empty.

Three options

An Agra-start car, driver and guide; from Delhi with car, driver and guide; or the full version with tickets and a five-star meal.

Practical

Eight hours in Agra plus the road. The Taj is closed on Fridays.