Ratnagiri in Odisha Has Two Excavated Monasteries and Hundreds of Votive Stupas, Three Buddha Heads Found Since December 2024 and a Place on India's UNESCO Tentative List

Ratnagiri, a hill in Jajpur district, Odisha, holds the ruins of a Buddhist monastery whose own clay seals name it as the great monastery of Ratnagiri. The Archaeological Survey of India (ASI) dug there in four seasons, 1957-58 to 1960-61, under Debala Mitra, and exposed a large brick stupa, two monasteries, a row of brick temples and hundreds of small stupas. It started again in early December 2024 and reported three large Buddha heads. India’s entry on UNESCO’s Tentative List, dated 22 December 2025, groups Ratnagiri with the neighbouring Lalitgiri and Udayagiri as the Buddhist Triangle sites of Odisha.

The name means “hill of jewels” in Odia. The site sits in the Assia hill range between the Brahmani and Birupa rivers, and The Hindu puts it about 100 km from Bhubaneswar, while PTI says about 80 km.

What the first dig recorded, season by season

Four field seasons are recorded in the ASI’s annual reviews, 1957-58 to 1960-61. Later accounts, including India’s UNESCO submission, give the dates as 1958 to 1961. The review for 1957-58 says the Eastern Circle, under Debala Mitra, dug part of the Ratnagiri hill and fully exposed a brick stupa in the south-western part. Its base was a square of about 47 feet (14 metres) on each side, with five recesses and six projections per face. The base stood to a maximum 9 feet, and the carefully rubbed brick facade carried traces of shell-lime plaster. A pit sunk through the centre showed a solid core of 65 courses of brick, about 16 feet 7 inches (5 metres) high. No relic was found in it, and the report says the relic, if there was one, may sit above the surviving top or away from the centre.

The 1958-59 season took up the mound to the north of the stupa. The review reports two full monasteries side by side, separated by a passage about 11 feet 5 inches (3.5 metres) wide, both facing south.

Monastery 1 was roughly 180 feet (55 metres) square, with an entrance porch reached by a flight of steps, a carved door-frame of chlorite (a green stone) with the goddess Gaja-Lakshmi on the lintel, a stone-paved inner court and twenty-four cells. Its shrine held a seated Buddha, 11 feet 9 inches high including the lion throne, built of khondalite blocks that the team found scattered in debris and put back together, flanked by Padmapani and Vajrapani. The reviewers judged the building double or multi-storeyed, from the staircase at its south-west corner. Monastery 2 was about 95 feet (29 metres) square with eighteen cells, and its cells in the eastern and southern rows each had a small inner anteroom with a stone-balustrade window onto the passage.

Bronze figures, hundreds of small clay sealings and a large number of stone images came out of the two buildings, and the review describes Ratnagiri as evidently a centre of bronze casting.

The seals, the temples and the older walls

A number of terracotta sealings from the dig carried a legend that the 1958-59 review reads as naming the establishment as the great monastery of the community of Buddhist monks of Ratnagiri, “a name which persists even now”. The same entry adds that the Tibetan historian Taranatha mentions a monastery of Ratnagiri built near the sea coast in Orissa in the time of a ruler named Buddhapaksha, whose identity is unknown. Puratattva dates Taranatha’s History of Buddhism in India to 1608.

Later seasons added more. The 1959-60 review reports that Monastery 2 had been built over the ruined walls of an earlier monastery, with traces of a still earlier one beneath its south wing, and a small brick temple of the Orissan type beside Monastery 1. The 1960-61 review lists Temples 2 to 6, including Temple 5, which held a 2.34-metre (7 feet 8 inches) khondalite Manjusri carrying the Buddhist creed in characters of about the tenth century. It also records 125 stupas still standing in place in one area south of Monastery 2.

Hundreds of small stupas

The first season found something the review calls unique to Ratnagiri, hundreds of miniature monolithic stupas lying jumbled over a wide area south-west of the main stupa. Many were decorated with lotus-petal bands and showed deities of the Mahayana and Vajrayana traditions, and some were inscribed with the Buddhist creed. The excavators suggested the area was either reserved for dedicating them or was a workshop selling them.

The 1958-59 review notes that the main stupa had been built directly over the ruins of an earlier brick structure and that another stupa base stood to its east, with five terracotta plaques inscribed with dharanis (short Buddhist spell-prayers) inside. The 2024 dig turned up several hundred more. The Hindu’s report says smaller votive sculptures were found set out in a line, which it connects to the Vajrayana practice of making an offering when a wish is fulfilled, and that the sheer number suggests a site many visitors came to.

The sources give different dates

The excavators were cautious. The 1957-58 review says one dharani text on a stone stupa of the eastern group, which lay about 1 foot 10 inches above the level of the main stupa’s base, belongs on the style of its letters to the late eighth or early ninth century, so the main stupa was built before then. It adds that a slab inscribed with the Pratityasamutpada sutra in Gupta-period characters proves earlier Buddhist buildings existed, because the Gupta custom was to place that text inside stupas.

For the monasteries the 1958-59 review says there was no direct evidence of date. It notes that the carving on Monastery 1’s doorways resembles the eighth-century temples of Bhubaneswar, which may roughly indicate when it was founded, and that some chlorite images recall the thirteenth-century Sun temple at Konark. The 1957-58 review also says the sculptures may show that the Mahayana-Vajrayana development of the Buddhist pantheon happened in this region somewhat earlier than usually supposed.

Later accounts compress that into a span. Puratattva, summarising Mitra’s report, says she dated the nucleus to the fifth century CE and the development to the twelfth. The Hindu gives the fifth to the thirteenth century and says Buddhist activity continued to the sixteenth. India’s UNESCO submission gives the fourth to the twelfth century on the style of the letters on the sealings, and says the monastery rose to prominence under the Bhaumakara dynasty in the eighth to tenth centuries.

The December 2024 season

On 13 November 2024 The Statesman reported that the ASI would dig at Ratnagiri again after more than six decades, working with researchers from Cotton University in Guwahati, Sambalpur University and Utkal University. Dibishada Brajasundar Garnayak, the superintending archaeologist of the Puri Circle, said the team was first cleaning the earlier trenches and removing dumped soil. He described the university tie-up as part of an ASI policy of sharing some digs with state departments and universities because of staff shortages.

PTI reported on 2 March 2025 that the dig started on 5 December 2024 after a gap of 63 years, and The Hindu’s account has the team gathering at a mound in the southern part of the site on 1 December. By March, PTI said, about 15 archaeologists had recovered three large Buddha heads, inscribed relics dating to the eighth and ninth centuries, another shrine complex, a large number of votive stupas and pottery thought to be 1,200 to 1,300 years old. The Hindu adds that the inscribed stone tablets are in Sanskrit in the Kutila script, and that the ceramics are mostly fine grey ware.

The largest head lay face down and took nearly two months to clear. The Hindu gives its height as 1.4 metres and calls it the largest found in Odisha, and PTI quotes an ASI archaeologist at about 1.5 metres. The Hindu says the ASI would decide later whether it is the largest Buddha head found anywhere in India, and no published measurement settles that. Stone palms and fingers found nearby are believed to come from a large seated Buddha. The team also reported a monolithic elephant sculpture, and The Hindu lists votive sculptures of Amoghasiddhi, Ratnasambhava, Akshobhya, Amitabha, Tara, Marici, Padmapani and Cunda.

Garnayak told The Hindu the aim was to look for a chaitya-griha, a shrine hall like those at Lalitgiri and Udayagiri. The Hindu reports that none has been found at Ratnagiri, though the team uncovered a shrine complex of a different shape. India’s UNESCO submission, by contrast, lists a chaityagriha among the structures at the site, so the sources differ on the point. Assistant Superintending Archaeologist Pragyan Pratima Pradhan told The Hindu that the work was still at a preliminary stage and that the scattered sculptures and stupas suggest possible vandalism at some point, because neighbouring sites are intact and an earthquake would not explain the pattern.

A village stands on the hillock. The Hindu records that some votive stupas now serve as bases for tulsi plants and that stones and carvings from the ruins sit in houses, that the ASI had appealed for their return, and that some residents want compensation where digging reaches family land.

Where Ratnagiri sits among its neighbours

The Hindu says the three Diamond Triangle sites lie within a 10-km radius. The UNESCO entry has Lalitgiri as the earliest, from the second to third century BCE, Udayagiri as a Mahayana and later Vajrayana centre, and Ratnagiri as “a major Vajrayana epicentre under the patronage of the Bhaumakara dynasty”. It adds a stone inscription in Nagari characters of the ninth or tenth century that records the repair of the stupa, the building of a pavilion and the digging of a well, and a copper-plate charter that India’s submission reads as showing a queen, Karpurashri, lived at Ratnagiri. The 1957-58 review identifies the charter as a village grant by the Somavamsi king Karnadeva in his sixth regnal year.

The submission also cites a record that the Bhauma king Sivakaradeva sent a Buddhist manuscript, the Gandavyuha, to the Chinese emperor in 795 CE through the monk Prajna, and it says six queens ruled in succession in the ninth and tenth centuries. Those are India’s statements to UNESCO, which publishes them with the note that the content is the sole responsibility of the State Party.

On the Nalanda comparison, Puratattva’s summary of Mitra says that in its original form the establishment can be compared with Nalanda and that its votive stupas rival those of Bodh Gaya. Buddhistdoor reports that historians have said Ratnagiri rivalled Nalanda as a centre of learning. For Nalanda itself see the university that drew the world, and for the kings who patronised the eastern monasteries see the Pala dynasty.

What Xuanzang says, and what he does not

Xuanzang’s account of Odra, in Samuel Beal’s translation, says the country had some hundred monasteries and 10,000 monks, all studying the Great Vehicle, and describes a monastery called Pushpagiri on a great mountain on its south-western frontier. It does not name Ratnagiri. Beal’s notes record that Alexander Cunningham took the two hills in the passage to be Udayagiri and Khandagiri near Bhubaneswar, and that remains probably of a stupa had been found near Aska.

Puratattva records that P. Acharya suggested in 1949 that Pushpagiri’s remains were the hills of Naltigiri, Udayagiri and Ratnagiri together. Buddhistdoor, citing The Indian Express, quotes an unnamed ASI official saying that Xuanzang might have visited Ratnagiri. The pilgrims’ own records are covered in the article on Faxian, Xuanzang and Yijing. The Konark temple, whose carving the 1958-59 review compares some of the chlorite images to, has its own article, the Sun Temple chariot.

As of 2 November 2026 the Buddhist Triangle is a Tentative List entry under criteria (ii) and (iv), which is a preliminary step and does not confer World Heritage status.