Ellora’s Kailasa temple was not built. It was excavated – cut top-down from the living rock, two hundred thousand tonnes of it removed, over roughly a century. Standing in the courtyard and understanding that there was no margin for error is the single most impressive thing in Indian architecture.
Ajanta, a hundred kilometres away, is the other half: Buddhist caves with paintings still on the walls, abandoned around the 5th century and not seen again until a British hunting party stumbled on them in 1819.
