Vaishali's Licchavi Relic Stupa Gave Up a Soapstone Casket of Ashes in the 1958 to 1962 Digs, and the Kolhua Lion Pillar With No Edict Is on India's Silk Roads Tentative List

The excavators who opened a small mound at Vaishali in Bihar in the late 1950s reported a mud stupa, first raised in the early fifth century BCE, with a cracked soapstone casket in its core. Inside were ashes mixed with earth, a conch shell, two glass beads, a scrap of gold leaf and a copper punch-marked coin. Sinha and Roy, whose report covers the digs of 1958 to 1962, say the mound most probably holds the stupa that the Licchavi clan of Vaishali raised over their share of the Buddha’s relics.

A few kilometres to the north-west, at Kolhua, a lion-topped sandstone pillar that the ASI attributes to Ashoka still stands beside a brick stupa and a stepped tank. India’s Archaeological Survey (ASI) put both places into one entry, “Ruins of Ancient Vaishali”, in India’s Silk Roads submission to UNESCO, dated 20 January 2010. It covers 2.77 hectares at Vaishali and 7.30 hectares at Kolhua.

The Licchavis’ share, in the text and in the pilgrim’s notes

The Maha-parinibbana Sutta, the Pali text on the Buddha’s last days, says that after his death at Kusinara the relics were divided into eight equal portions. In the Vajira and Story translation, the Licchavis of Vesali, which is Vaishali, erected a stupa over their portion “at Vesali” and held a festival. Eight stupas for the relics, a ninth for the urn and a tenth for the ashes: that is the sutta’s count.

Xuanzang, the Chinese pilgrim, came in the seventh century. In Samuel Beal’s translation of his record, a monastery of the Sammatiya school lay north-west of the royal precincts. East of it stood a stupa marking where Sariputra and others were said to have reached release, and south-east of that one stood a stupa that a king of Vaishali raised over a share of the Buddha’s relics. Xuanzang adds that, according to the records of India, the stupa first held a quantity of relics equal to ten pecks, that King Ashoka opened it and took nine-tenths, and that a later king who tried to open it again gave up when the earth trembled. Our piece on Faxian, Xuanzang and Yijing covers the pilgrims in more detail.

Sinha and Roy write that no local tradition marked the spot, so the team relied on that passage. They list the villages where they dug, among them Basarh, Baniya, Kolhua and Virpur, and say the stupa lay near the Kharaun tank. Krishna Deva’s report on the 1950 season notes that this tank is traditionally believed to be the Abhisheka-pushkarini, the coronation tank of the Licchavis. Bihar Tourism’s page on the stupa says it is one of the eight parts of the Buddha’s remains and calls it a protected site of the ASI.

What the mound held

The Jayaswal Research Institute in Patna carried out the excavation. Sinha and Roy’s report is titled for 1958 to 1962, while the UNESCO text dates the stupa’s excavation to 1957 to 1958, and Bihar Tourism and Akashvani News give 1958 to 1962. Per that institute’s own page, the stupa’s excavation led to the discovery of the famous relic casket.

Sinha and Roy describe the original stupa as a small structure built entirely of earth, in thin layers, each separated from the next by a film of white kankar, the lime-rich nodules found in the soil of the plain. It had been built over a deposit containing Northern Black Polished Ware, the glossy pottery the excavators use as a dating marker. Four brick enlargements followed. They assign the first to the Mauryan period, on the evidence of polished Chunar sandstone found in the debris, and the third and fourth to the first century BCE and the first century CE.

Their casket lay in a breach cut into the stupa, not in a stone box or a brick well, and earth pressure had cracked it. It contained no bone, only ashes mixed with earth, together with one punch-marked copper coin, two glass beads, one conch and a thin piece of gold. The excavators judged that whoever made the breach had taken about three-fourths of the relics and left about one-fourth, and the casket was only a quarter full. Xuanzang’s record that Ashoka took nine-tenths and left one-tenth is a separate account from that inference.

India’s nomination text gives the same contents and says the stupa grew to 17.1 metres in diameter through Mauryan, Sunga and Kushana enlargements. The excavation report’s summary gives a smaller figure, 40 feet (about 12 metres) after the third enlargement, with the fourth being a buttress, and the two texts do not explain the gap. The nomination adds that the ayakas, the raised platforms at the cardinal points where worshippers placed offerings, noticed on the south and east sides, are “probably the earliest example of its kind”.

Dates, the casket’s whereabouts, and the earliest-stupa claim

The excavation report puts the original stupa at the beginning of the fifth century BCE, and the nomination and Bihar Tourism say the fifth century BCE. Krishna Deva’s 1961 report on the earlier season records that the late Dr A. S. Altekar identified the mound as one of the original relic stupas of the Buddha, built by the Licchavis in the sixth century BCE. The two reports differ by about a century on the founding date. Sinha and Roy base theirs on the pottery found in and beneath the stupa.

India’s nomination says the relic stupa at Vaishali “is so far accepted to be the earliest stupa”. It names Piprahwa, Amaravati and Nagarjunakonda as other relic stupas. That is the ASI’s own comparison, made in a submission that UNESCO publishes on the responsibility of the country that wrote it, and it should be read as India’s claim.

Where the casket is kept is reported two ways. Bihar Tourism’s page says it was brought to Patna Museum in 1972, and the institute’s page says it is kept at Patna Museum now. Akashvani News reported on 29 July 2025, the day the Buddha Samyak Darshan Museum and Memorial Stupa was inaugurated at Vaishali, that the relic casket “has been enshrined” on the first floor of the museum. ETV Bharat quoted the Bihar chief minister saying the relics were placed on that floor. That complex stands on 72 acres near the Abhisheka-pushkarini and, by both reports, cost over Rs 550 crore (Rs 5.5 billion). Both the tourism and the institute pages are undated, so as of 2 November 2026 a visitor should confirm the casket’s location before travelling.

The lion pillar at Kolhua

Xuanzang describes a stupa built by Ashoka to the north-west, with a stone pillar beside it that he gives as about 50 or 60 feet high and topped by a lion. South of the pillar he places a tank dug by monkeys for the Buddha’s use. Alexander Cunningham matched the description to the pillar at Kolhua, also called Bakhra after a nearby village, in his first survey report, and repeated the case in 1880 to 1881.

His 1880-81 measurements give a shaft of 21 feet 10 inches above ground and a capital with the lion of 9 feet 5 inches, together about 9.5 metres. Its lower 14 feet lay underground, down to the water level, and he could not feel the bottom when he dug there in 1862, so he allowed that the pillar might once have stood 50 feet, as Xuanzang says. He called it the heaviest of the lion pillars. Garrick, Cunningham’s assistant, photographed it in the same season and wrote that the lion faces north. Bihar Tourism’s page says the lion faces north, the direction the Buddha took when he left Vaishali for Kusinara.

Published heights for the pillar run three ways: 11.00 metres in the nomination, 18.3 metres on the Bihar Tourism and Vaishali district pages, and about 9.5 metres above ground in Cunningham. None of the sources says what its figure measures.

The nomination calls the pillar probably one of Ashoka’s earliest and says it does not bear the usual edict, though a few letters in shell characters of the Gupta period are cut on it. Its comparison section claims that the Vaishali pillar, with a square abacus, is the earliest and the only one without an inscription. These are the ASI’s claims in a nomination, and tuput has not tested the word “only” against every pillar. Bihar Tourism’s page, for its part, calls the column one of Ashoka’s edicts, so the published descriptions are not uniform. For the wider Ashokan record, see our article on Ashoka the Great.

What the stupa beside the pillar commemorates is not settled in the sources. Cunningham wrote that Ashoka’s stupa was clearly the ruined one just north of the pillar but that its purpose was not stated. India’s nomination says the brick stupa commemorates the monkey chief’s offering of honey to the Buddha, while Bihar Tourism says the pillar marks his last sermon and announcement of his approaching death. Xuanzang puts the honey stupa to the south of the tank, not at the pillar.

The tank, the shrine and the monastery plan

From 1989 to 1993 the ASI’s Excavation Branch at Patna dug at Kolhua under the direction of L. C. Singh. The ASI’s 1989-90 review reports a votive stupa of swastika shape (a votive stupa is a small offering-stupa) beside twenty-six others, dated to the Gupta period, and a monastery in a second area 80 metres south-west of the pillar. It describes the monastery as almost square, 10.30 by 10.10 metres, with three cells and a gallery on each side, twelve cells in all, around a courtyard, and with its entrance on the east facing the main stupa. It records three phases, Kushana, Gupta and post-Gupta, and a brick platform outside the west wall that the review suggests was for bathing.

India’s nomination describes the same building differently: a monastery “like a swastika on plan”, built in the Gupta period “probably for nuns”, with twelve rooms. It also says nuns’ monasteries of this kind are found only at Vaishali. The excavation review does not use the word swastika for the monastery or mention nuns, and the nomination does not say what its identification rests on. Both texts count twelve rooms.

Measurements of the tank differ as well. By the 1992-93 review, the Kushana brick-lined tank was fully exposed at about 32.5 metres east-west and 31.5 metres north-south, with seven tiers, two bathing ghats, a corbelled arch and a pucca drain. The nomination gives about 65 by 35 metres. Cunningham had measured the pond at 240 by 140 feet, about 73 by 43 metres, and identified it with the Markata-hrada, the monkeys’ tank of Xuanzang’s account. In 1990-91 the team also found an inscribed amulet in Ashokan Brahmi script from the earliest level, and the 1989-90 season had produced a silver punch-marked coin from the earliest level excavated.

How far “republic” fits Vaishali

Bihar Tourism’s page on Vaishali says historians maintain that one of the world’s first democratic republics, with an elected assembly of representatives, flourished there in the sixth century BCE in the time of the Vajjis and Lichchavis. The Maha-parinibbana Sutta records the early textual picture. King Ajatasattu of Magadha announced he would destroy the Vajjis, and the Buddha told his attendant Ananda that the Vajjis would not decline while they held frequent and well-attended assemblies, met and dispersed in concord, and kept to their ancient constitutions. The same sutta has Magadha’s ministers building a fortress at the village of Pataligama to guard against the Vajjis, and the Buddha calls the place Pataliputta, a trade centre. The Mauryan pillared hall found at Pataliputra has its own article, on Kumhrar.

The historian Upinder Singh writes in her textbook that these polities, called ganas or sanghas, were not like modern democracies. Power, she says, lay with an aristocracy of the heads of leading Kshatriya families, with a chief and an aristocratic council that met in a hall called the santhagara. She describes the system as a compromise between government by assembly and by an oligarchy within the assembly. Singh adds that early nationalist historians, Jayaswal among them, tended to exaggerate the democratic features, and that later writers took a more dispassionate view. She says the Jataka figure of 7,707 Licchavi rajas cannot be taken literally but points to a large assembly.

A related farewell tradition belongs to Kesariya, where the Licchavis are said to have followed the Buddha as he left for Kusinara; see the Kesariya stupa for that site.

Where the nomination stands

UNESCO’s page for the Silk Road Sites in India lists criteria (ii), (iii) and (vi) for the serial submission and notes that the ASI submitted it on 20 January 2010. A Tentative List entry is a country’s own statement of sites it may later propose for the World Heritage List, and UNESCO’s disclaimer on the page says the content is the sole responsibility of the State Party. Vaishali is therefore not a World Heritage Site. On 2 November 2026 the entry still showed 20 January 2010 as its submission date.