Humayun's Tomb — guide fee, and whether you need one

It is the building the Taj descends from, and the line is direct rather than inferred. Humayun’s Tomb, finished in the 1570s, established the scheme: a domed mausoleum on a high plinth, bilaterally symmetrical, set at the centre of a four-part charbagh garden divided by water channels, with a double-shell dome over the chamber. The Taj, eighty years later, is that scheme executed in white marble at a riverside rather than a garden centre. Seeing them in the same week, with a guide who makes the comparison explicit, is the single best way to understand either.

Yes — one ticket, ₹35 or ₹550, covers Humayun’s Tomb, Isa Khan’s tomb and the garden enclosures around them. Isa Khan’s is the first thing you pass and almost everyone walks straight by it: an octagonal walled tomb garden from the 1540s, twenty years older than Humayun’s, built for a nobleman of the Sur dynasty that briefly displaced the Mughals. It takes fifteen minutes and it is the better-preserved of the two gardens.

Early morning or the last hour before sunset — the complex opens at sunrise and closes at sunset, the red sandstone takes warm light extremely well, and the middle of the day flattens it. Late afternoon in the winter months, between about half past four and six, is the best hour in Delhi for photographs. Camera use is free here, unlike several Jaipur monuments, so there is nothing to pay for the privilege.