Place · Chola capital city · India
Gangaikondacholapuram
The Chola capital Rajendra I founded in 1025 CE in Perambalur district, Tamil Nadu — named 'the city of the Chola who conquered the Ganga' after his north Indian campaign of 1021-23 that reached the Ganga delta. The Gangaikonda Cholapuram temple built around 1035 was Rajendra's deliberate answer to his father Rajaraja I's Brihadishvara at Thanjavur: slightly smaller vimana but with more plasticity in the sculptural programme and a curving silhouette rather than the straight pyramid of Thanjavur. The abandoned capital's temple survives, though the city has reverted to agricultural land. UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1987 as a Chola group with Thanjavur and Darasuram.
- Function
- Authority & administration
- Patron dynasty
- Chola
- Confidence
- Established / referenced
- Location
- 11.206, 79.450
Connections (4)
- Teaching lineageDarasuram Airavatesvara
Darasuram's Airavateshvara is the third of the Great Living Chola Temples, built by Rajaraja II about a century and a half after Gangaikondacholapuram, and it elaborates what the first two established rather than extending it — smaller, with a front mandapa shaped as a chariot on stone wheels and miniature friezes covering the base. The imperial scale has gone and the carving has taken over, which is what happens to the style at the end.
- CampaignNagapattinam
Rajendra's fleet for the Srivijaya campaign of 1025 sailed from the Coromandel roads around Nagapattinam, in the reign that also built Gangaikondacholapuram to commemorate the expedition to the Ganges. The two projects belong together: a new capital named for a northern march and a naval expedition across the Bay of Bengal, mounted by the same state within a few years of each other.
- Chola overseas expansionKedah / Kadaram
The Tanjore inscription listing Rajendra's overseas conquests of 1025 names Kadaram — usually identified with Kedah on the Malay peninsula — first and most prominently among the places taken. Gangaikondacholapuram was built to commemorate his imperial reach in both directions, north to the Ganges and east across the Bay of Bengal, and the inscription is the principal evidence that the naval expedition happened at all.
- In the same set asThanjavur Brihadishvara
Thanjavur was inscribed in 1987 and Gangaikondacholapuram and Darasuram were added in 2004 to make the Great Living Chola Temples. The three are within eighty kilometres and four generations of each other: Rajaraja's, his son Rajendra's answer to it at his own new capital, and Rajaraja II's smaller and more refined version a century later.
On these journeys
- Pallava and Chola — the Tamil temple
- UNESCO World Heritage — cultural
- Chola expeditions overseas — Lanka, the Maldives and Srivijaya
Sources
Great Living Chola Temples — UNESCO
Open Gangaikondacholapuram in the repository →