Delhi: Skip-the-Line Humayun's Tomb Tour with Transfers (3-Hour)

Quieter than the Taj, and the same idea sixty years earlier

Humayun's Tomb takes a fraction of the Taj Mahal's visitors and it is the building the Taj came from. If you have an afternoon in Delhi and one monument in you, this is the one.

The commission

Bega Begum built it for her husband in 1565, nine years after his death, and brought a Persian architect — Mirak Mirza Ghiyas — to design it. She is said to have devoted the rest of her life to the project.

What resulted was the first great Mughal garden tomb in India: the tomb at the centre of a four-part charbagh divided by water channels, under a double dome, in red sandstone with white marble inlay, symmetrical to the millimetre.

Every one of those elements reappears at the Taj in 1632, at greater scale and in white marble. The lineage is direct.

Inside

An octagonal chamber on a platform nearly seven metres high, with arched recesses on every face.

Humayun lies here, and so do more than a hundred other Mughals — princes, wives and nobles buried in the side chambers over the next two centuries, which is why it is sometimes called the dormitory of the Mughals.

The last emperor, Bahadur Shah Zafar, hid at this tomb in 1857 and was captured here.

The garden

The Aga Khan Trust for Culture restored it over a decade from 2007, removing about a million cubic feet of later earth fill to recover the original levels and rebuilding the water channels so they run. It is the best conservation work in the country.

Arrive early and the channels have water in them and the light comes straight down the axis.

Also worth the walk

Isa Khan's tomb inside the complex, twenty years older than Humayun's, with its own enclosure and mosque, and almost always empty.

Three options

Guide only; car, driver and guide; or with the entry ticket included.

Practical

Three hours. Entry is ₹600 for foreign nationals. Open daily.