Rājarāja Chola I#Rajaraja
A figure from the books
#Rajaraja
Rājarāja Chola I · 947–1014 CE · reigned 985–1014
In the books · 1 chapter
Who this is
Empire — conqueror of south India, Lanka and the Maldives; surveyor of every field in his realm; builder of the Brihadīśvara temple at Thanjavur.
“The emperor who sacked the oldest Buddhist capital in the world also endowed a Buddhist monastery for a foreign king — and wrote both, like everything else, into the permanent record.”
The big idea, in the book's words:
“A state is what it writes down. Rājarāja measured his kingdom, endowed a mountain of a temple, and then had the entire account — salaries, jewels, sheep, street addresses — carved into stone, creating the richest archive of any medieval Asian economy.”
From the book
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