The 1898 excavation
In January 1898 William Claxton Peppé, manager of an estate at Birdpur, dug into a brick stupa on his land. Several metres down he found a large stone coffer containing five vessels, one of them a soapstone casket with a short inscription in early Brahmi script running round its lid. With the vessels were bone fragments and hundreds of small jewels and ornaments of gold, pearl, crystal and semi-precious stones.
The inscription has been read in more than one way. The commonest reading is that it records the relic deposit of the Buddha, the Blessed One, of the Shakyas, made by the brothers of Sukiti together with their sisters, sons and wives. Other readings take it to refer to the relics of the Shakya kinsmen of the Buddha. Its date is generally placed in the Mauryan period or slightly earlier, making it one of the oldest inscriptions in India. A claim that it was a forgery, linked to the discredited archaeologist Alois Führer, has been examined and is not accepted by most specialists.
The relics
The British government gave the bone relics to King Chulalongkorn of Siam, who distributed portions to Buddhist communities in Burma, Sri Lanka and Japan, and enshrined others at the Golden Mount in Bangkok. Most of the jewels went to the Indian Museum in Calcutta, and Peppé was allowed to keep a share. In 2025 a planned auction of the Peppé family's share in Hong Kong was halted after objections from the Indian government, and the jewels were brought back to India.
The stupa
The later excavation reported that the stupa had been built and enlarged in three phases, and that the caskets found in the 1970s lay in an earlier level than the one Peppé had reached. If that reading is right, the earliest deposit is older than the inscribed one, which complicates the question of how the inscription relates to the original relics; the interpretation of the stratigraphy has itself been debated. Monasteries and a shrine surrounded the stupa, and the site was in use into the early centuries CE.
Kapilavastu?
Between 1971 and 1977 the Archaeological Survey of India under K. M. Srivastava excavated Piprahwa again and the nearby mound of Ganwaria. Deeper in the stupa they found two more caskets with bone fragments, and at a monastery nearby they found terracotta sealings with an inscription naming the community of monks of Kapilavastu. Srivastava concluded that Piprahwa was Kapilavastu, the Shakya capital where the Buddha grew up. Nepali archaeologists favour Tilaurakot, west of Lumbini in Nepal, which has a walled city of the right period. The two countries promote their respective sites, and the question remains open. Some of the later relics have been taken on exhibition to Buddhist countries, drawing large crowds.
Further reading
- Strong, John S. The Buddha: A Short Biography. Oneworld, 2001
- Schopen, Gregory. Bones, Stones, and Buddhist Monks. University of Hawaii Press, 1997
- Thapar, Romila. Early India: From the Origins to AD 1300. Penguin, 2002
See also
- Gautama Buddha — Gautama Buddha, born Siddhartha Gautama, was a Shakya prince of ancient India whose renunciation and enlightenment, traditionally dated to the sixth and fifth centuries BCE, became the founding event of Buddhism.
- Ashoka — Ashoka (reigned c. 268–232 BCE) was the third emperor of the Maurya dynasty, who after conquering Kalinga promoted Buddhist ethical principles across an empire spanning most of the Indian subcontinent.
- Buddhism — Buddhism is a religious and philosophical tradition founded in northern India in the 5th century BCE by Siddhartha Gautama, the Buddha, centred on the Four Noble Truths and a path to liberation from suffering.
This entry was last revised on 12 November 2026.