Siddhartha's home city, dug out of a jungle mound
When the Chinese pilgrims Faxian and Xuanzang came looking for Kapilavastu, they found a city already in ruins, and they wrote down the walls, gates and stupas they saw. In the 1890s, after the Lumbini pillar was found, those accounts sent archaeologists west into the forests of what is now Kapilvastu district. In 1899 P. C. Mukherji of the Archaeological Survey of India mapped a walled rectangle at Tilaurakot and argued it was the Shakya capital.
Later digs by Nepal's Department of Archaeology and international teams filled in the picture. Under the brick walls lay an earlier wooden palisade dated to the 6th century BCE, and beneath that, flood silt from the Banganga. The city was planned on a grid, with a central walled complex, gateways on its north and west sides and a tower on the south wall. Just south of the citadel, a mound called Lohasariya held tonnes of iron slag from a workshop active from around 400 BCE.
Scholars still argue. Some place Kapilavastu at Piprahwa, across the border in India, where a relic casket was found in 1898. But the weight of opinion favours Tilaurakot, and Nepal put it on UNESCO's tentative list in 1996. Today the farmers of the surrounding Awadhi-speaking villages graze buffalo along the old moat.
