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Takht-i-Bhai

Location: 16 km of North East of Mardan town in Northwest Frontier Province
Civilization: Buddhist Civilization in 2nd - 5th Centuries
Accessibility: Metalled roads link the Takht-I-Bhai with Peshawar. There are regular bus and Taxi services to Takht-I-Bhai from Peshawar. Takht-Bhai has a small Railway station and it can be access through train.

Monastery at Takht-i-Bhai The ruins of an ancient Buddhist monastery are situated on the top of 152 meters (500feet) high hill. It is about 80 kms from Peshawar and 16 kms northwest of Mardan City. This site has produced fragmentary sculptures in stone and stucco that indicate the highly developed sculptural sense of their creators.

But the most remarkable feature is the design and arrangement of the range of small shrines, which surrounds the main stupa-court. This site dates back from 2nd-3rd century AD.The site consists of large rectangular court, on the north of which is the main monastery and to the south is a well-planed monastic shrine of high terrace.

The village is built on the ruins of the ancient town the foundation walls, which are still to be seen in tolerably good formation. As a proof that it was in the past occupied by the Buddhists and Hindu races, coins of those periods are still found at the site. From the description of Song Yun, a Chinese pilgrim, it appears that it was on one of the four great cities lying along the important commercial route to India.

It was well-fortified town with four gates outside the northern one, on the mound known, as Chajaka Dehri was a magnificent temple containing beautiful stone images covered in gold leaf. Nor far from the rocky defile of Khaperdra did Ashoka build the eastern gate of the town outside which existed a stupa and a sangharama. The monastery, on the north, was probably a double storied structured consisting of an open court ringed with cells, with kitchens and a refectory attached. On the west there is a double row of subterranean mediation cells.