The Temple of Heaven is a 273-hectare complex in southern Beijing where Chinese emperors performed the winter solstice sacrifice to Heaven every year from 1420 to 1911 — a ritual running without interruption for 491 years. UNESCO inscribed it in 1998; the Forbidden City is 4 kilometres northwest and the Summer Palace 16 kilometres northwest.
The Forbidden City — formally the Imperial Palace of the Ming and Qing Dynasties — covers 72 hectares at the centre of Beijing, containing 8,707 rooms across 980 buildings and holding 1.8 million objects in its Palace Museum. Two further UNESCO World Heritage Sites, the Temple of Heaven and the Summer Palace, stand within 16 kilometres.
Rani ki Vav, built around 1063 CE in Patan by Queen Udayamati as a memorial to King Bhimdev I, is a seven-storey stepwell 64 metres long with 500 major sculptures preserved intact by river sediment for seven centuries. UNESCO-listed in 2014 and now featured on India’s ₹100 note, it sits 25 km from the Solanki-era Modhera Sun Temple and 140 km from the Champaner-Pavagadh UNESCO site in south Gujarat.
The Sundarbans — 10,000 square kilometres of mangrove across Bangladesh and India — is the world’s largest contiguous mangrove forest and habitat for the only mangrove-adapted Bengal tiger population on Earth. The Bangladesh portion (UNESCO 1997) is accessible only by boat from Khulna. The Mosque City of Bagerhat, 60 km north, is the natural companion UNESCO site for any itinerary in the Khulna Division.
The Somapura Mahavihara at Paharpur, built by Pala Emperor Dharmapala in the late 8th century CE, was the largest Buddhist monastery south of the Himalayas — 177 monastic cells around a cruciform central temple on a 27-acre site. Scholars from China, Tibet, and Indonesia studied here until an Afghan general destroyed it in 1203 CE. The ruins are a UNESCO World Heritage Site, with Mahasthangarh (Bangladesh’s oldest archaeological site) 12 km north and Bagerhat’s mosque city 300 km south.
The Mosque City of Bagerhat, built by Turkish commander Khan Jahan Ali in the 1450s, contains more than 360 structures across 7 square kilometres — including the Sixty Dome Mosque, which has 60 pillars and 77 domes. Abandoned after the founder’s death and reclaimed by jungle for four centuries, the site is now a UNESCO World Heritage Site and the starting point for a wider itinerary taking in the Sundarbans mangroves 60 km south and the Buddhist monastery at Paharpur 300 km north.
Kaziranga National Park in Assam holds 2,613 greater one-horned rhinoceros — 68 percent of the world population — on 430 sq km of Brahmaputra floodplain, plus the world’s highest tiger density at 14 per 100 sq km. The park was created in 1905 after Lady Curzon returned from a visit having seen no rhinos at all. Manas Wildlife Sanctuary, 200km west, was repopulated from Kaziranga’s stock after insurgency wiped out its animals in the 1990s.
Keoladeo Ghana National Park in Bharatpur was engineered in the 1850s as an imperial duck shoot — Lord Linlithgow’s party killed 4,273 birds in a single day in 1938 — and is now a UNESCO-listed sanctuary for 370 bird species, 55km from the Taj Mahal and 40km from the Mughal ghost city of Fatehpur Sikri. The Siberian cranes that once wintered here stopped coming after 1999 and are believed extinct in their eastern migratory flock.
Champaner-Pavagadh Archaeological Park in Gujarat preserves the only pre-Mughal sultanate capital in India that was abandoned rather than built over — a 25 sq km site containing 114 monuments untouched since 1535. Within 380km lie three more UNESCO sites: the ornately carved 11th-century stepwell Rani ki Vav at Patan, the Bronze Age Indus Valley city of Dholavira, and the Buddhist cave paintings of Ajanta.
