Get ready for a slew of Taj pictures

We spent one whole day in Agra. We were at the main gate of the Taj before sunrise and then went back in the late afternoon for sunset. The marble is lustrous and changes hue with the passing hours, so it really does merit repeat visits.
I'm starting with the evening pictures here.
First up are details from the entrance to the inner courtyard.

A little history: The Taj Mahal was built by Shah Jahan, a Mughal emperor, as a mausoleum for and monument to his love for his favorite wife. When his son later imprisoned him in the Red Fort, Shah Jahan's one request was that he be kept in a place where he could see the Taj Mahal every day. His son complied with this request and his prison apartment (quite posh for a prison really) had postcard views of the monument. According to our guide, as Shah Jahan's eyesight failed he could no longer see distances, so his son (?) gave him a large diamond that he was able to use as a lense to capture/reflect the image of the Taj where he could see it. That stone was later cut up and half of it became the jewel in the crown alluded to in the PBS miniseries--a.k.a. the Star of India which is the centerpiece of the Queen of England's crown.

Art history: Mughal emperors were all muslim, and the style of the architecture and the decoration reflects this. In medieval islamic art and architecture there's never any figural representation as these were deemed profane. Because of this, botanical imagery, abstract pattern, and caligraphic scripts from the Koran constitute the majority of the decoration in Mughal architecture. The architect here used a nifty optical illusion in his design--the caligraphy around this doorway appears to be the same size all the way around because the panel bearing the script actually increases in size slightly as it goes up the building. The caligraphy is all made from inlaid stone, much of it still original to the building.