One of the Seven Wonders of the World (according to Collier's Encyclopedia).  This is an amazing piece of architecture!  But at the end of the day, it's not extremely functional (at least today, anyway).  It's just a Tomb...a very large, beautiful, magnificent, expensive :) (in the terms of the day) Tomb.  When it was built in 1648 it cost a whopping 320 lakhs (or 32 million rupees which is about $640,000).  Absolutely AMAZING what could be done with less than a million dollars!

The Taj Mahal is on the banks of the Yamuna River.  This is the back of the Taj Mahal from the opposite side of the Yamuna River.  On the right and the left you see two different buildings, one is a mosque and the other was used as a guest house.  The two buildings look exactly the same, the entire structure and landscape at the Taj Mahal is symetrical, including the building itself.  It was built as a tomb by Shah Jahan (the King) for his favorite wife.  She died while giving birth to their 14th child.  Construction was started shortly after her death and took 20,000 people 22 years to complete.

Here you see the Taj Mahal from the front side with the reflection pools.  The main base of the Taj Mahal stands about 40 meters tall, the largest dome is 45 meters tall and the spire on the top is 11 meters (just to give you some perspective).

This is me in front of the Taj Mahal, actually holding it up.  There was a lot of wind that day and we wouldn't want it to blow over!

This is the entry gate to the Taj Mahal.  You'll notice that along the top center portion of the gate, there are 11 white spires.  On the opposite side of the gate there are an additional 11 spires, for a total of 22 showing the 22 years it took to build the Taj Mahal.

This is the back side of the Taj Mahal, however it looks exactly the same as the entrance on the opposite side.  The writings that go up the doorway and across the top and down the other side are inscriptions from the Koran (their holy book, similar to the bible).  They are actually an optical illusion, because in looking at them they look exactly the same size all the way from the bottom to the top, and across the top of the entry way.  In order to get this effect the writings at the top had to be bigger than the writings at the bottom.

This is a picture of the ceiling inside of the entry way.  Notice that if you follow the edge of the inscribed pieces that look like windows and follow them up and across the top of the entry they weave an intricate spider web that is entirely etched in the marble.

This is a picture of the building to the side of the Taj Mahal.  On one side is the mosque, on the other the guest house.  The two buildings look exactly the same.

This is a picture from the back side of the Taj Mahal looking across the Yamuna river.  The gaurd post that you see on the other side of the river and the little bit of wall following off to the left are exactly like the gaurd post that you would find on the four corners of the lot at the Taj Mahal.  The reason is, once the Taj Mahal was completed the King Shah Jahan wanted to build a structure exactly the same as the Taj Mahal on the opposite side of the river, but in Black Marble.  His son felt that his father was crazy, so he would not let him do this, and put him in jail for the remainder of his life.