The garden that was meant to see the Taj
In Shah Jahan's Agra, both banks of the Yamuna were lined with walled gardens, and the emperor moved between them by boat. Mehtab Bagh was the last of them, and the one with the best view.
A family of garden-makers: Babur, the first emperor, complained in his memoirs, the Baburnama, that Hindustan had no proper gardens, and made them along the river at Agra.
Babur's recipe: stepped terraces, water channels and pavilions.
A chain of gardens: his descendants and their nobles followed. By the seventeenth century the riverbanks were lined with walled gardens.
At a glance
- Built
- In Shah Jahan's reign, with the Taj
- Built by
- Almost certainly the Taj's planners
- Open
- Fridays too, unlike the Taj
- Allow
- About an hour
- Best time
- The last hour before sunset
- Photography
- Welcome, bring a longer lens
- Getting there
- 20 to 30 minutes from the Taj hotels
- Eleven on the east bank: about that many stood opposite the city. Some survive in ruins, some as names, and two, Itimad-ud-Daulah and Ram Bagh, are still worth visiting.
- The last in the chain: Mehtab Bagh, the moonlight garden, sits at its southern end.
- Part of the Taj plan: it was laid out while the Taj Mahal was being built. Its width matches the Taj garden opposite, and its axis lines up with the tomb's.
- Older roots, perhaps: some stories link the site to Babur and it may have held an earlier garden, but what was excavated belongs to Shah Jahan's time.
- A garden for a view: a pleasure garden for looking at the Taj, perhaps especially by moonlight, when marble and reflection would have seemed to glow.
- Very Mughal, very modern: a garden whose purpose is a view. Perhaps that is why our guests take to it so easily.
- The black Taj: the seventeenth-century French gem merchant and traveller Jean-Baptiste Tavernier wrote that Shah Jahan began a black marble twin for himself here, and that Aurangzeb stopped the work.
- A pond mistaken: in 1871 a British archaeologist saw an old pond on the site and took it for that tomb's foundations. As we shall see, the spade has settled it.
Lost under the silt and found again
When our parents first drove across the river to look at the Taj from behind, there was no garden here at all, just a sandy mound, a few farmers' fields and one broken red tower on the riverbank.
Buried by the river: the Yamuna floods every monsoon, and the garden sits low on the flood plain. Three centuries of sand and silt covered it.
Carried away: villagers took its bricks and stone for their own houses. By the 1990s it was a great mound, almost forgotten outside Agra.
The dig: in 1994 the ASI began removing tens of thousands of cubic metres of earth.
Facts to know
- Excavation began
- 1994, Archaeological Survey of India
- Study
- Elizabeth Moynihan, with the Sackler Gallery
- Book
- The Moonlight Garden
- Replanted
- About 80 Mughal-era species
- The study: the American garden historian Elizabeth Moynihan led a parallel survey with the ASI, supported by the Smithsonian's Sackler Gallery, published as The Moonlight Garden.
- What they found: walls, water channels, pavilion foundations and, on the river side, a large octagonal tank that once held fountains.
- The key: Moynihan read the tank as placed so the Taj would be reflected in it, as well as in the river, on a still night. The alignment is too precise to be an accident.
- No black tomb: the dig found no trace of foundations. What had been mistaken for one was the garden's own pond.
- Replanted: with plants known from Mughal gardens, about eighty species, including guava, citrus, jamun, neem, hibiscus and ashoka. Paths follow the old lines.
- Not perfect: some modern features have crept in, and parts flood in the rains. But it is a real Mughal garden on its real site, more than most of Agra's riverbank can say.
How a Mughal riverfront garden works
In Rajasthan our gardens grew up around wells and stepwells, hidden inside palace walls. The Mughals brought a different idea from Central Asia, and Agra's riverbank is where it changed.
The charbagh: from the Persian for four gardens. Two paths or channels cross at right angles and divide a walled square into four, each often divided again.
Moving water: it runs along the channels, falls over carved stone chutes called chadars, and gathers in tanks and fountains.
Why a chadar: the word means a sheet. Water spread thin over carved stone shimmers like cloth.
Words to know
- Charbagh
- Four gardens, a square divided by water
- Chadar
- A carved stone water chute
- Riverfront garden
- Pavilion on a terrace at the river
- Water source
- Bullock-driven wheels from the Yamuna
- A garden of paradise: the design came from Persia and Central Asia, and echoes the Quran's paradise watered by four rivers.
- The problem in Hindustan: a charbagh needs water, and on these dry plains the only reliable source was the river.
- Agra's answer: gardens along the Yamuna, with the main pavilion on a raised terrace at the water's edge, not in the centre.
- Lifting the water: bullock-driven wheels raised it from the river into the channels.
- Arriving by boat: visitors landed at the river steps and looked back over the water from the terrace.
- Agra's own invention: historians call it the riverfront garden. The Taj is its grandest example, and Mehtab Bagh its mirror.
- One garden, one river: put the two together, as the builders seem to have meant, and the Taj stands at the centre of a single garden divided by water.
- Across the empire: the same idea climbed hillsides in Kashmir and spread over terraces at Lahore, in the Shalimar gardens, with water falling from level to level.
- Into Rajasthan: the charbagh travelled into our palaces at Amber, Deeg and the courts of Jaipur and Udaipur, meeting the older Rajput love of water and shade.
The river between the two gardens
Our grandmother never called it the Yamuna. She called it Yamuna-ji, with the respect due to a goddess, and she would fold her hands when we crossed the bridge.
Yamuna-ji: the ji is the respectful ending Indians add for elders, and for the divine.
Its course: from Yamunotri in the Garhwal Himalaya to its meeting with the Ganga at Prayagraj.
A sacred river: for Hindus, the Yamuna is the daughter of the sun and sister of Yama, the lord of death.
Facts to know
- In Hindu belief
- Daughter of the sun, sister of Yama
- Upstream
- Braj, Krishna's country
- Dry months
- A slow, shrunken stream
- Monsoon
- Can flood the plain below the garden
- Krishna's river: upstream in Braj it is the river of his childhood. At Mathura and Vrindavan pilgrims still bathe at the ghats and float lamps at dusk.
- Already holy: the Mughals built their gardens beside a river that was sacred long before them.
- Shah Jahan's Yamuna: wider, deeper and cleaner. Boats carried the court between fort and gardens, and the river ran close under the Taj's walls.
- Today's river: much of the water is taken upstream for farms and cities. In the dry months what reaches Agra is slow, shrunken and often polluted.
- The monsoon: it rises again and can flood the whole plain below Mehtab Bagh.
- A watched stretch: conservationists worry about what the changing river means for the Taj's foundations, and this reach is one of the most watched in India.
- Life goes on: in early morning and late afternoon, buffaloes wade in and fishermen work from small boats. On festival days families make offerings at the water's edge.
Local tip
Look for the buffaloes, the fishing boats and the families at the water from the river wall. They belong to this view as much as the dome does.
Walking the garden
Mehtab Bagh is simple to understand, which is part of its charm. You walk in from the north, down the central path, and the Taj rises in front of you as you go.
The route we walk
- Enter
- From the north, away from the river
- Walk
- Down the central path
- Stop
- The octagonal tank
- Size
- About 300 metres square
- Finish
- The river wall and the red tower
The drive across the river
The route: cross the Yamuna by one of the city's bridges and drive south through fields and village lanes.
- How long: about twenty to thirty minutes from the hotels near the eastern gate, depending on traffic.
- On the way: buffaloes, women carrying fodder, and the tops of the Taj's minarets over the trees long before you arrive.
The northern entrance
- Hidden at first: from the modern gate on the north side you see only trees and a long path.
- Then revealed: the Taj appears at the end of the walk, framed by the garden's lines, much as it does through the great gate opposite.
The central walk and the beds
Four quarters: divided by paths and channels in the Mughal way, with planted beds.
- In winter: citrus and guava trees in leaf and the hibiscus in flower.
- The channels: often dry, but you can see how the water once ran towards the river.
The octagonal tank
Near the river end: the large tank uncovered in the 1990s, edged in stone, with remains of fountain fittings.
- The upside-down Taj: stand at its northern edge and look south. With water in it and still air, the Taj appears at your feet.
- The photograph almost nobody takes: the single best one in Agra.
The red tower
- One of four: the garden had a red sandstone tower at each corner. Only the south-east one survives, over the river, with its small domed top.
- The oldest standing thing here: the best way to imagine the garden's original height and colour.
The river wall
Where garden met river: a long wall, partly intact, along the southern edge.
- As close as it gets: perhaps three hundred metres from the Taj without crossing the water.
- By season: wide and fast in the monsoon. In the dry months a ribbon with sandbanks, with people bathing buffaloes or washing clothes below the tomb.
The birds
Good birding: a quiet stretch of river with fields around it.
- Common sightings: red-naped ibises, also called black ibises, feeding on the lawns, egrets, cormorants, kingfishers and parakeets.
- In winter: migrant ducks and waders sometimes rest on the sandbanks.
- Bring binoculars: equally good for the Taj's inlay across the water.
Why the view from here is the best in Agra
Guests who have seen the Taj that morning often ask why they should look at it again in the evening. Five minutes after arriving, they stop asking.
Inside the complex: you are always close to the building and surrounded by people.
From here, everything: the tomb on its plinth, the four minarets, the red mosque to the right and its twin to the left, the terrace wall and the river.
The Mughals' own view: it explains the building better than any guide.
Facts to know
- You see
- The whole composition at once
- Face
- The north side, above the water
- Closes
- Around sunset
- Lenses
- A wide one and a moderate telephoto
- The side few photograph: the north face, identical to the south, rising straight from the water with no garden in front.
- Standing on nothing: from the river it was meant to look that way, which is why the builders put it at the garden's edge.
- Winter sunset: white to cream, then gold and peach, then soft grey-pink as the sun drops.
- The last light: the mosque on the western side catches it and glows red.
- Dusk: lamps come on in Taj Ganj behind the tomb, and the dome becomes a pale silhouette.
- No moon here: despite the name, the garden closes around sunset. For the moon, a Taj-facing room at The Oberoi Amarvilas is the answer.
- Lenses: a moderate telephoto isolates dome and minarets against the sky and catches the inlay in sidelight. Our photography tips have more.
When to come
The rule is simple. Come for the last hour of daylight, and come in the months when the air is clear.
Arrive an hour before sunset: time to walk in warm light, find your spot at the tank or river wall and watch the colours change.
Too early: the Taj is flat white in the afternoon glare.
Too late: you may find the gates closing.
Facts to know
- Arrive
- About an hour before sunset
- Best months
- October and November
- Also very good
- February and March
- Fridays
- Open
- Mornings work too: the garden opens early, and on a clear morning the Taj rises out of the river mist with the sun to its left.
- When we suggest dawn here: on a Friday, when you cannot go into the Taj, or on a second morning in Agra. For most guests, sunset is still the hour.
- October and November: the monsoon has washed the air, the river is still fairly full, and sunsets are long and clear.
- December and January: cold evenings and haze, sometimes fog, softening the dome to a pale ghost. Some guests love it, others want a postcard.
- April to June: heat haze can flatten the view, but evenings are still the most bearable part of the day.
- The monsoon: July to September. Parts of the garden may flood and paths get muddy, but storm skies over a full brown river make dramatic pictures.
- Friday evenings: open when the Taj is closed. A Thursday or Friday evening here shows you the Taj on a day you cannot go inside. Our best time to visit Agra goes month by month.
How to visit
Mehtab Bagh is the easiest monument in Agra. There is little to arrange, which is part of its pleasure.
Tickets: bought at the gate. Queues are rare, even at sunset.
A guide: not essential, but a good one tells the excavation story and the black Taj legend, and points out the tank and the surviving tower.
Before you go
- Tickets
- At the gate, rarely a queue
- Paths
- Level gravel and earth
- Bring
- Binoculars, insect repellent
- Winter
- A jacket for the river air
- Same guide, same afternoon: we often pair it with Itimad-ud-Daulah.
- Access: paths are level, mostly gravel and earth, and reasonably manageable with limited mobility, though uneven or muddy after rain.
- Mosquitoes: carry insect repellent in the warmer months. The riverbank at dusk brings them.
- Cold evenings: bring a jacket in winter. The river air cools fast after sunset.
- The drive back: leave plenty of time. The bridges can be slow in the evening rush.
- The villages: lanes are narrow and people live here. Ask before photographing anyone.
The other gardens of the east bank
Mehtab Bagh is the end of a story that starts upstream. On a good afternoon we drive the whole east bank, from the oldest garden to the last.
North to south
- Ram Bagh
- Among the oldest Mughal gardens
- Chini ka Rauza
- Glazed tilework
- Itimad-ud-Daulah
- Finished around 1628
- Mehtab Bagh
- The last garden, facing the Taj
Ram Bagh
The northernmost garden: counted among the oldest Mughal gardens in India.
- Its old name: Aram Bagh, the garden of rest.
- Babur's link: by tradition he was buried here briefly before his body went to Kabul.
- The earliest form: terraces step down to the river, with raised walkways and channels.
Chini ka Rauza
Whose tomb: Afzal Khan Shirazi, a Persian poet and minister of Shah Jahan, a little downstream.
- The chini: patches of blue, green and yellow glazed tile still survive, rare in an Agra of marble and sandstone.
- Best light: in the morning sun the surviving tiles still shine.
Itimad-ud-Daulah
The jewel of the east bank: the tomb of Nur Jahan's father, finished around 1628.
- The bridge: its marble inlay links Akbar's sandstone to the Taj.
- When: we like the mid-afternoon, on the way to Mehtab Bagh.
The village of Kachhpura
- On the approach: a small, old mosque that local tradition and the ASI date to Humayun's reign.
- Farmers, not hotels: fields, cattle and everyday riverside life remind you who the Taj's neighbours are.
Who will love it, and who may not
We are honest with our guests about every place, even the ones we love. Mehtab Bagh is not for everyone.
Perfect for: couples, photographers, anyone who found the Taj complex too crowded, and second-time visitors who want fresh eyes.
Families: children run on the lawns and look for birds while adults watch the sky. There are none of the Taj's security queues.
Who it suits
- Couples
- Sunset and calm
- Photographers
- The whole composition
- Families
- Lawns and birds
- Less for
- Those wanting a grand monument
- Stories on the spot: children love hearing the black Taj legend here, then hunting for the reflection in the tank. Bring insect repellent for dusk.
- Honeymooners: our honeymoon journeys almost always end an Agra day here.
- It may disappoint: anyone expecting grandeur. The garden is modest, the restoration incomplete and the surviving tower small.
- Hazy evenings: the view can be soft rather than sharp.
- High summer: the heat lingers into the evening on the riverbank.
- The right expectation: come for the view and the calm. The garden is the frame, not the picture.
Building an evening around it, and where to stay
Mehtab Bagh is the full stop at the end of an Agra day. Here is how we write the sentence before it.
A classic Agra day
- Sunrise
- Taj Mahal
- Late morning
- Agra Fort
- Afternoon
- Itimad-ud-Daulah
- Sunset
- Mehtab Bagh
A classic Agra day
- The rhythm: sunrise at the Taj, breakfast and rest, Agra Fort in the late morning, a long lunch, Itimad-ud-Daulah in the afternoon, Mehtab Bagh at sunset.
- All of Shah Jahan's Agra: in a single day. Our Agra itinerary has longer versions.
Dinner afterwards
- Back across the river: Esphahan at The Oberoi Amarvilas, or Peshawri at ITC Mughal.
- More ideas: our food of Agra guide, from Mughlai kebabs to the petha you should take home.
Where to stay
- The view continues: at Amarvilas, from your balcony after the garden closes.
- Choosing a room: our guide to luxury hotels in Agra explains which rooms to ask for and compares the other good hotels near the eastern gate.
Journeys that include it
- Sunset built in: our Rajasthan with the Taj Mahal and classic Golden Triangle journeys both include it.
