Archaeological Site of Nalanda Mahavihara

Activity at the site runs from about the third century BCE. The great monastic university was established under the Guptas in the fifth century CE and continued to the thirteenth, attracting students from China, Korea, Japan, Tibet and South-East Asia. The Chinese pilgrim Xuanzang studied and taught there in the seventh century and left a detailed account. The institution was sacked in the late twelfth or early thirteenth century, and tradition holds that its library burned for an extended period.

The excavated plan is unusually regular: a row of monasteries on the east facing a row of temples on the west, separated by a broad path. The monasteries follow a standard plan of cells around a courtyard, several rebuilt in place so that earlier structures survive within later ones. Temple Site No. 3 is a stepped stupa enlarged repeatedly, with earlier shells preserved inside.

Nalanda is the most complete surviving example of an ancient centre of organised higher learning, and the transmission point from which Buddhist scholarship reached much of Asia. The stratified rebuilding makes it an exceptional record of monastic architecture developing over eight centuries.

Inscribed in 2016 under criteria (iv) and (vi) as an outstanding example of an educational and religious institution and for its association with the transmission of Buddhism.