Which country is home to the Taj Mahal?

India, at Agra. It is a tomb, built by the Mughal emperor Shah Jahan for his wife Mumtaz Mahal, who died in 1631 giving birth to their fourteenth child. Construction took over twenty years and something like 20,000 workers, and the marble was hauled from Rajasthan by teams of oxen and elephants.

The engineering is more careful than the romance suggests. The four minarets lean very slightly outward, so that if one ever fell it would fall away from the tomb rather than onto it. The whole complex sits on a series of wells packed with rubble and timber, which cope with the shifting ground by the Yamuna river - and there is now genuine concern that as the river runs lower the timber is drying and rotting, and the foundations with it.

The story that Shah Jahan had the architects' hands cut off so they could never build anything comparable is a nineteenth-century invention with no contemporary source, and so is the black marble twin he supposedly planned across the river. What did happen is that his son Aurangzeb deposed him and confined him for the last eight years of his life in the Agra Fort, where he could see the building down the river, and he was eventually buried inside it beside her - his tomb the only asymmetrical element in a rigorously symmetrical building.