Dynastic History | Agra Fort — Eight Years, Four Thousand Builders a Day

Work began on the Yamuna bank in 1565, on the site of an older brick fort called Badalgarh, and the Archaeological Survey of India gives the job eight years and some four thousand builders a day, finished in 1573. That daily figure descends from Abu'l-Fazl, the court's own historian, along with his count of five thousand buildings raised inside the walls in the Bengali and Gujarati manner. Both are the establishment's arithmetic about itself, not a payroll. The house that commissioned the fort styled itself Timurid — Gūrkāniyān; "Mughal" is Europe's rendering of "Mongol".

Red sandstone came in by cart and river. The land revenue of the provinces, assessed in cash and collected a harvest at a time from cultivators who never saw the place, paid for it and was then stored behind the same walls: the fort was a treasury, a mint and an armoury before it was a residence.

Later emperors rebuilt inside it. Shah Jahan took down much of Akbar's sandstone and put up white marble — the Khas Mahal, the Shish Mahal, the Musamman Burj and three small marble mosques, the Moti, the Nagina and the Mina. The succession war of 1658 ended with Aurangzeb holding the empire and his father held here; by the ASI's account Shah Jahan spent eight years inside the fort until his death in 1666.

Visitors enter by the Amar Singh Gate at the south, and only there. The Indian Army still uses part of the fort and that part is closed to the public; the ASI runs the rest, ticketed, sunrise to sunset.

📸 Cover: The Amar Singh Gate, the fort's visitor entrance, ASaber91, CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons