Group of Four Maidans, Charaideo

The Group of Four Maidams at Charaideo lies about 28 km east of Sivasagar, in Charaideo district, Assam. Charaideo served as the first capital of the Ahom kingdom, established by Sukapha, who reigned from 1228 to 1256 CE after arriving from the Mong-Mao region bordering present-day Myanmar and China. The site subsequently became the preferred burial ground for Ahom royalty, with wives, attendants, pets and valuables interred alongside the interred monarchs, in a tradition sometimes compared to the pyramids of Egypt.

Each maidam is a distinctive funerary structure: an underground vault with one or more chambers is capped by a domical superstructure and covered over with an earthen mound, surrounded by an octagonal dwarf wall, with a small open pavilion called a chow-chali at its summit. Excavation of one of the maidams has revealed brick construction, an octagonal enclosure wall and fragments of ivory and wooden artefacts. The Archaeological Survey of India has protected the Group of Four Maidams as a Monument of National Importance since 1951, and the wider Charaideo moidam complex - jointly managed with the Assam government's Directorate of Archaeology - was inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in July 2024, becoming India's 43rd World Heritage property and the first cultural heritage site from Northeast India to receive the designation.