The Peacock Throne, in Persian Takht-i-Tāūs, was the imperial throne of the Mughal emperors of India, commissioned by Shah Jahan in 1628 and completed in 1635. Encrusted with emeralds, rubies, diamonds, and pearls and surmounted by two peacock figures whose fanned tails were set with hundreds of gemstones, it was the most ostentatious throne in the early-modern world and a recurring reference point in any history of high-jewellery patronage. It was looted by the Persian emperor Nader Shah during his sack of Delhi in 1739 and dismantled afterwards; its gemstones dispersed across multiple subsequent collections, and several of its principal stones are believed to survive in the Iranian Crown Jewels and elsewhere.

Commission and construction

Shah Jahan, the fifth Mughal emperor and the patron of the Taj Mahal, commissioned the Peacock Throne shortly after his accession in 1628. Construction took seven years under the supervision of the imperial atelier in Agra and was completed in 1635. Contemporary court records and the accounts of European travellers — particularly the French jeweller Jean-Baptiste Tavernier, who visited the Mughal court in the 1660s — describe the throne in detail.

The throne's structure was of solid gold, weighing in the order of one tonne, with a canopy supported on twelve emerald-clad pillars. The principal feature was the pair of peacocks whose fanned tails were inlaid with rubies, emeralds, sapphires, diamonds, and pearls, with a parrot carved from a single emerald between them. The throne incorporated several individually famous gemstones, including the Timur Ruby — actually a spinel — and traditionally the Koh-i-Noor diamond, though the Koh-i-Noor's specific incorporation in the original Peacock Throne is debated by historians.

Tavernier's contemporary valuation of the throne was approximately six million rupees, equivalent at the time to roughly twice the construction cost of the Taj Mahal — although valuations of this kind from the period should be treated with caution given the difficulty of converting seventeenth-century Indian rupee values into reliable modern terms.

Political position

The Peacock Throne functioned as the principal seat of Mughal sovereignty for a century, used by Shah Jahan and his successors Aurangzeb, Bahadur Shah, Jahandar Shah, Farrukhsiyar, and Muhammad Shah. It was housed in the Diwan-i-Khas of the Red Fort in Delhi, the private audience hall of the Mughal emperors. The throne's gemstone density was a deliberate political statement, the Mughal court's wealth made manifest in the encrusted seat of imperial power.

Nader Shah's sack and the dispersal

The Mughal Empire's decline through the early eighteenth century left Delhi vulnerable to external attack, and in 1739 the Persian emperor Nader Shah marched on Delhi, defeated the Mughal army at the Battle of Karnal, and entered the capital. The sack of Delhi that followed was among the most destructive episodes in Indian early-modern history; tens of thousands of inhabitants were killed, and the imperial treasury was systematically looted. The Peacock Throne was carried back to Persia among the spoils.

Nader Shah's assassination in 1747 and the subsequent dismemberment of his empire scattered the throne's components. Most authorities believe the throne itself was dismantled rather than transferred intact, with its gold melted and its gemstones removed for redistribution. The Timur Ruby (spinel) eventually reached the British Crown Jewels via the East India Company. The Koh-i-Noor, separately famous and with its own complex provenance, took a different route through the Sikh Empire to Britain in 1849. Several of the Peacock Throne's principal stones are believed to survive in the Iranian Crown Jewels, held at the Central Bank of Iran's vault in Tehran, including the Daria-i-Noor diamond.

Reproductions and the second throne

A second Peacock Throne was constructed for the Mughal emperor in the eighteenth century, but its design and condition fell well short of the original; it was destroyed during the 1857 rebellion. The Iranian Naderi Throne, despite its name and visual debt to Mughal ceremonial seating, is a distinct object commissioned by Fath-Ali Shah Qajar in the early nineteenth century and is held in the Golestan Palace in Tehran.

In the gem trade

The Peacock Throne's afterlife in the gem trade is the long, often opaque history of its component stones. Provenance attribution to specific Peacock Throne gemstones is rarely conclusive; documentary records from the Mughal court do not survive in sufficient detail, and the dispersal in Persia was not catalogued. What can be said is that the destruction of the throne released into circulation an exceptional concentration of fine emeralds, rubies (including the Mughal-period Burmese Mogok material that would later define pigeon-blood expectations), pearls, and diamonds — a flow whose echoes appear in the inventories of later Mughal, Persian, Ottoman, and European royal collections through the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Further reading

• Victoria and Albert Museum — Mughal jewellery and decorative arts
• British Museum — South Asian and Persian collections
• Metropolitan Museum of Art — Mughal art and jewellery
• International Gem Society — historical gemstone provenance