Place · great stupa & relic casket · Pakistan

Kanishka Stupa, Shāh-jī-kī-Dherī

Function

Sacred site & pilgrimage

Confidence

Established / referenced

Location

33.999, 71.592

Worth knowing

The bone relics from the casket were presented to Buddhist Burma and are enshrined at Mandalay, while the casket itself is in Peshawar — so the contents and the container of the subcontinent's tallest ancient building are now in different countries.

Connections (5)

• PatronageKanishka

  The great stupa at Shāh-jī-kī-Dherī is Kanishka's building and is the largest thing the Kushan dynasty is known to have put up. Faxian, Songyun and Xuanzang each describe it as the tallest structure they had seen, with a timber superstructure of thirteen storeys over a stone base, and their figures work out well over a hundred metres. Spooner's excavation of 1908–09 found the relic chamber with a gilded bronze casket inscribed with Kanishka's name and dated to his first regnal year, which is one of the anchors of Kushan chronology.

• Site adjacencyPurushapura / Peshawar

  The stupa stood immediately outside Purushapura, the Kushan capital, and was its principal monument — the building that made Peshawar a destination for Chinese pilgrims for five hundred years. Faxian came about 400, Songyun in the 520s and Xuanzang in the 630s, and all three went to the same mound. The city and the stupa are one complex: the dynasty's political seat and its religious statement within a few kilometres, which is how the Kushans presented themselves everywhere they ruled.

• AnalogueButkara & Swat valley

  Butkara in Swat and Kanishka's stupa at Peshawar are the two poles of Gandharan stupa building. Butkara was enlarged five times from the Mauryan period onward and its sequence shows the form developing in situ across seven centuries, which is why the Italian excavation there is the reference for stupa typology. Kanishka's is the form at its imperial maximum, over a hundred metres with a timber superstructure — the limit of what the type could be pushed to, and consequently the one that did not survive.

• AnalogueAmluk-Dara stupa

  Amluk-Dara is used to imagine what Kanishka's stupa looked like, because it is the only great Gandharan stupa that still has most of its elevation. Its stepped drum and much of the dome are standing below Mount Ilam in Swat, so the proportions of base to drum to dome can be measured rather than inferred. Kanishka's, the tallest of them all, is a levelled mound under modern Peshawar known only from Chinese descriptions and Spooner's trenches. The small intact one is the evidence for the large lost one.

• Image migrationPeshawar Museum

  What Spooner found in the stupa is now in the museum. His 1908–09 excavation of Shāh-jī-kī-Dherī reached the relic chamber of Kanishka's great stupa and recovered the inscribed gilt-bronze casket that names the king and dates itself to his first regnal year — one of the anchors of Kushan chronology. The casket went to the Peshawar Museum, a few kilometres away; the Buddha relics inside it were presented to Buddhist Burma and are at Mandalay; and the stupa mound itself is built over.

On these journeys

• The north-west — Gandhara, the Indus and the Hindu Kush

Sources

Wikipedia, “Kanishka Stupa”. D. B. Spooner, Archaeological Survey of India Annual Report 1908–09; Xuanzang, Da Tang Xiyu Ji; Faxian, Foguo Ji.

• Wikipedia — Kanishka Stupa