Almost everything written about visiting the Taj Mahal is about the building. Very little of it is about the two decisions that determine what your visit is actually like, which are which day you go and what time you arrive.
First: it is closed on Fridays
The complex is closed to tourists on Fridays, when the mosque within it is in use for prayers.
This catches people out with some regularity, usually those who have built a tight Delhi to Agra to Jaipur circuit and did not check which day fell where. Confirm it against your dates before you book transport, because it is not a problem you can solve on the morning.
Why sunrise, specifically
The usual advice is to arrive at sunrise, which sounds like the sort of thing people say about every monument. Here three separate advantages happen to arrive at the same moment.
The light. White marble is a poor subject in hard overhead sun, which flattens it and blows out the detail. At low angles it takes on the colour of the sky, so it reads pink and gold at dawn and turns progressively harder and whiter through the morning. The building genuinely looks different, not just better photographed.
The crowd. It builds steadily from opening and it does not thin out again. The first hour is the quietest you will get.
The heat. The complex is open, paved and largely shadeless, and the marble platform is reached barefoot or in thin covers. In any month from March onwards, the difference between seven in the morning and midday is the difference between a pleasant visit and an endurance exercise.
Arrive before the gates open rather than at opening. The queue starts forming beforehand.
Get close to a wall
The silhouette is the famous part and it is the part you have already seen a thousand times. The part almost nobody photographs is the surface.
Walk up to the marble and look at the floral patterns closely. They are not painted or carved. They are pietra dura: individually shaped fragments of semi-precious stone set into recesses cut in the marble, fitted so precisely that the seams are difficult to see. A single small flower can be made of dozens of separate pieces. There is also inlaid calligraphy around the great arch, and the lettering is subtly enlarged as it rises so that it appears uniform from the ground.
Five minutes doing this is the difference between having seen the Taj Mahal and having seen a photograph of it in person.
The symmetry, and the one break in it
The complex is rigorously symmetrical. The mosque on the west side is matched by an identical building on the east, the jawab, which has no religious function and exists to balance the composition.
Inside the mausoleum, the symmetry breaks once. Mumtaz Mahal’s cenotaph sits on the central axis; Shah Jahan’s, added later, sits beside it and off-centre. It is the only asymmetric element in the design and it is worth looking for.
What to do with the rest of the day
Agra Fort is the obvious second stop and is consistently underrated by people who have spent their enthusiasm on the morning. It is a large red sandstone complex with its own palaces inside, and it has a direct connection to the story: Shah Jahan spent his final years confined there, within sight of the building he had commissioned.
Mehtab Bagh is a garden on the opposite bank of the river, directly across from the Taj. It is the sunset counterpart to the sunrise visit: the building from the other side, across the water, with the light behind you.
Practical notes
There are restrictions on what may be brought in, security is thorough, and the queue reflects that. Shoe covers are used on the marble platform. Ticketing arrangements, timings and the rules on what you can carry all change from time to time, so check the current position close to your visit rather than relying on anything written in advance, including this.
If Agra is part of a larger trip
It is commonly done as a leg between Delhi and Jaipur, in which case the transport options on that corridor apply, and what catches people out on a first trip is worth reading before you go.
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