Taj Mahal

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The white marble tomb built at Agra by the Mughal emperor Shah Jahan for his wife Mumtaz Mahal, commissioned in 1632 and with the wider complex completed by 1653. Construction is reported to have employed some twenty thousand workers under a board of architects led by Ustad Ahmad Lahauri. It was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List in 1983 and elected a New7Wonder in 2007. Like the Mausoleum at Halicarnassus two thousand years earlier, it is a tomb that became a wonder because of the scale of a private grief.