The Kesariya Stupa in East Champaran Rises in Six Brick Terraces to About 31.5 Metres and Spans About 123 Metres, and the ASI Has Been Digging It Out Since 1997-98

The Kesariya stupa in East Champaran district, Bihar, is a circular brick monument that rises in six visible terraces to a solid drum. Ishani Sinha of Deccan College, writing in 2019 with measurements supplied by the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI), gives its extant height as about 31.5 metres and its base diameter as about 123 metres. She calls it “undoubtedly one of the tallest and most voluminous stupas in India”.

The survey’s Patna Circle began digging the mound in the 1997-98 season under K. K. Muhammed, and in June 2025 the survey announced that work had resumed in 2024. The terraces carry rows of small cells, and each cell once held a seated Buddha modelled in clay mixed with crushed brick and lime under a smooth skin of lime plaster, a technique known as stucco. Only the lower parts of those figures survive.

What the excavation reports record, season by season

The 1997-98 report says Muhammed’s team opened sixteen trenches, each 10 metres square, on the north-east slope. They found a terraced circular stupa faced with eight to ten courses of brick, with three terraces exposed. Each carried rows of three cells, and the gaps between the rows were filled with patterns: niches on the first terrace, a star shape on the second and a serrated design on the third. Walkways for going round the monument (circumambulation) had rammed floors of crushed brick and lime mortar.

The next season added eighteen trenches. The 1998-99 report counts five terraces, bricks of two standard sizes, and a base circle more than 100 metres across. Nine cells up to the third terrace were fully cleared. Each measured about 2.20 by 1.80 metres, with a doorway of 70 to 90 centimetres. A Buddha seated in the lotus posture had stood on a brick platform against the back wall of each cell, and evidence of the figure survived in five of them. In one cell, small side niches held lion figures that the report assigns to the late Gupta period on style.

In 1999-2000 the team opened twenty-two trenches in one strip up the northern face to expose every terrace and the drum together. The fourth and fifth terraces turned out to have cells only at the four cardinal directions, and the fifth has a single cell in each, probably, the report says, because the circumference shrinks higher up. The drum on top stood 9.38 metres high and about 22 metres across, with traces of an ayaka, a projecting platform, at each cardinal point. At the bottom, four or five courses of three more cells were found 4.5 metres beyond the base circle, which the report reads as a sign of another terrace below.

The 2000-01 report adds an 80-centimetre staircase connecting the upper terraces, hidden inside the polygonal patterns so that it hardly shows in a general view. It also describes the head of a stucco Buddha, the first facial features the dig had produced, which the report says confirm a Gupta date. The same volume records that a 30-metre-wide strip from the drum to the base circle had been conserved by resetting and pointing the brickwork.

What Sinha added in 2019, and the survey in 2025

By Sinha’s account the Patna Excavation Branch took over the work in 2018-19, and about half the structure had been exposed by rough approximation. The 2018-19 season uncovered a wall 4 metres thick running round the base about 18 metres out. If it circles the whole monument, she writes, the diameter would be about 167 metres and the terrace count seven. She also offers a second reading, that the wall is a later addition to give pilgrims a wider path, since votive stupas, which belong outside the body of a main stupa, stand close to the present base. A floor had not been reached, so she calls 32.5 metres the minimum height.

The ASI’s June 2025 post says the stupa currently has six visible terraces above ground, each with a series of cells. It states that “Recent excavations suggest the existence of an additional terrace below the present ground level”. The 2024 trenches also exposed brick walls, open drains and a rammed floor, plus two cells on the third terrace with the lower parts of stucco Buddhas, and part of an outer walkway northwest of the stupa.

The mound before the dig

Visitors once saw only the brick tower on top of a large grassy mound. A sketch of it by B. H. Hodgson appeared in the Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal in 1835, with no description. Alexander Cunningham, who gave the first detailed account in his report for 1861-62, notes that the tower is drawn too small and the mound too steep in that sketch.

Cunningham also records that a gallery had been cut to the centre of the mound upwards of forty years earlier, by a colonel’s servant according to local report. He thought Lieutenant-Colonel Mackenzie of the Madras Engineers, whose name and the year 1814 are cut on the Bakhra pillar, probably gave the order. “No discovery was made,” he writes. He measured the mound at 62 feet high (about 19 metres) and 1,400 feet round (about 427 metres), and the tower on top at 68 feet 5 inches across at its base. He guessed that the original monument stood not less than 150 feet above the surrounding ground, and that the tower sat on the ruins of an older and larger stupa. Locals called it Raja Ben ka Deora, the fort or temple of King Ben, a ruler credited in the local story with powers of a universal monarch.

M. H. Kuraishi’s 1931 list of monuments protected under Act VII of 1904 in Bihar and Orissa includes the stupa. Kuraishi records that buttresses to hold up the overhanging upper brickwork were built in 1911-12.

Why Kesariya is tied to the Buddha’s last road to Kushinagar

The tradition behind the site, as Sinha tells it, is that the people of Vaishali followed the Buddha as he left for Kushinagar, where he died, and that at the edge of their territory he sent them home and gave them his alms bowl as a memorial. The Lichchhavis, the ruling clan of Vaishali, are said to have raised a stupa on the spot. Sinha calls Kesariya a memorial stupa, one that marks an event and holds no relics of the Buddha. Cunningham took the same view in 1861-62.

The identification rests on the Chinese pilgrims, and the texts do not name Kesariya. In James Legge’s translation, Fa-Hien describes the Lichchhavis being turned back by a deep ditch the Buddha made appear and given his alms bowl, and says a stone pillar was set up with an account engraved on it. Samuel Beal’s translation of Xuanzang puts a great stupa for the farewell 50 or 60 li northwest of Vaishali, and separately an old deserted city 200 li or a little less to the northwest, where Xuanzang says the Buddha taught about an earlier life as a universal monarch named Mahadeva. Sinha takes the 200 li passage as Kesariya, and the distance as about 50 kilometres. The pilgrims themselves are covered in our article on Faxian, Xuanzang and Yijing.

Cunningham made the match, adding a point from the texts: he quotes the Buddha telling Ananda that a stupa for a universal monarch goes where four main roads meet, and he found two high roads crossing within a quarter mile of the mound. Revisiting in 1880-81, he argued that the bowl itself went back to Vaishali with the Lichchhavis, so the stupa could not have been raised over it and was a marker for the spot. Kuraishi in 1931 wrote that nothing could be said of the age or nature of the buried structure until the mound was examined thoroughly. D. R. Patil in 1963 called Cunningham’s farewell reading “equally likely” with the Mahadeva one.

How old it is, and how the date has moved

Cunningham thought the upper stupa belonged to the middle ages, from AD 200 to 700. Kuraishi reports that Dr. Bloch, in the survey’s 1902 report, placed it in the first centuries of the Christian era, and that Dr. Spooner, in a conservation note of 16 January 1911, thought the structure below might go back to Mauryan or even pre-Mauryan times.

The excavation reports bring in new evidence. The 1997-98 report said the present stupa could be assigned to the seventh century on its pottery, images and architecture. By 1998-99 the report separated two phases by brick size: bricks of about 36 by 21 by 6 centimetres for a Sunga-Kushan phase, and bricks of about 32 by 16 by 5 centimetres for a late Gupta one. Sinha adopts the same two sizes. She dates the dominant phase to the Gupta period, the 5th and 6th centuries CE, when the cells and stucco Buddhas were added to an earlier low stupa. She compares the stucco figures with those in the stupa shrines at Nalanda and Vikramshila, later than the Gupta-period figures at Nalanda and earlier than the Pala-period ones at Vikramshila, and reads them as showing that stucco work was active in the region from the 5th to the 10th century. The abstract of her paper calls that earlier phase Sunga-Satavahana and dates it to the 1st and 2nd centuries CE, while her chronology section calls it Sunga-Kushana. Outlook, quoting the ASI, says the stupa was built in the Sunga-Kushana period and enlarged in the late Gupta period.

None of the four excavation reports quoted here, nor Sinha’s paper, gives a radiocarbon or other laboratory date. The phases rest on brick sizes, moulded brick profiles, pottery and the style of the images. The Bihar Tourism page says the stupa was initially built in the 3rd century BCE, without saying on what evidence, and none of the excavation accounts read for this article gives a date that early.

Tallest in the world? What the sources say

Bihar Tourism calls Kesariya “tallest and largest Buddhist stupa in the world”, giving 104 feet (about 31.7 metres). The East Champaran district page says ASI officials declared that Bihar houses “the tallest ever-excavated Stupa in the world”, puts the stupa at 104 feet, one foot above Borobudur in Java, and gives 123 feet before the 1934 earthquake and 150 feet in the stupa’s heyday. The 150-foot figure matches Cunningham’s 1861-62 estimate for the original monument.

The ASI’s own post does not rank the stupa. Sinha’s wording is “one of the tallest and most voluminous stupas in India”, and she writes that the combination of many terraces and a stucco Buddha in a cell on each has “no known parallel elsewhere in the world”. She sets it beside Borobudur, which she gives as about 32 metres high, like Kesariya, and dated to the 8th century. UNESCO dates Borobudur to the 8th and 9th centuries. Sinha says it is too early to suggest Kesariya influenced Borobudur or that both drew on a common source, and she asks for the question to be studied.

The ranking pages give no method, such as whether base, height or volume counts, and the figures themselves have moved with each season’s digging. This article therefore follows Sinha’s wording and measurements.

What is still unsettled

Sinha asks for a section cut through to the centre of the stupa, to test whether a lower, earlier stupa lies inside, and for the floor at the base to be found so the full height can be fixed. On her rough count about half the monument was out of the ground in 2019. The ASI’s June 2025 post records that excavation resumed in 2024.