The Coffer Under the Mound

In January 1898 William Claxton Peppe, the English manager of an estate at Birdpur, drove a trench down through a large brick mound on his land at Piprahwa. About seven metres down his workers struck a massive sandstone coffer, hollowed from a single block and closed with a heavy lid. Inside were five small reliquary vessels of steatite and crystal, together with bone and ash and a dazzling scatter of offerings, some 1,800 pieces of worked gold, garnet, carnelian, pearl and other stones, cut into stars, flowers, leaves and tiny figures. It was one of the richest and best-documented relic deposits ever opened in India, and Peppe, unusually for his day, recorded it carefully and published his findings. The stupa itself was a solid brick dome of great antiquity, later shown to overlie and underlie phases of Buddhist building; the coffer had lain sealed at its heart, undisturbed, since it was set there in the early centuries of the Buddhist era.