- Lived:
- born 3 November 947 — one of the very few precisely dated royal birthdays of ancient India, reconstructed from his recorded birth-star — in the Kaveri delta of the Chola country; died at Thanjavur (Tanjore), his capital, early in 1014
- Field:
- empire — conqueror of south India, Lanka and the Maldives; surveyor of every field in his realm; builder of the Brihadīśvara temple at Thanjavur
- The Big Idea:
- A state is what it writes down. Rājarāja measured his kingdom, endowed a mountain of a temple, and then had the entire account — salaries, jewels, sheep, street addresses — carved into stone, creating the richest archive of any medieval Asian economy.
- In their words:
- "Let the gifts made by us, those made by (our) elder sister, those made by our wives, and those made by other donors … be engraved on stone on the sacred shrine." (Thanjavur temple inscription, trans. E. Hultzsch, South Indian Inscriptions II)
- If you remember one thing:
- The emperor who sacked the oldest Buddhist capital in the world also endowed a Buddhist monastery for a foreign king — and wrote both, like everything else, into the permanent record.