Buddhism, built what may
have been the tallest building in the world at the time — a giant stupa, to
house the Buddhist relics, that was located just outside the Ganj Gate of the
old city of Peshawar. The Kanishka stupa was said to be an imposing structure,
as one traveled down from the mountains of Afghanistan onto the Gandharan
plains. The earliest account of the famous building was documented by Faxian,
the Chinese Buddhist pilgrim, who was also a monk, who visited the structure in
400 AD and described it as being over 40 change
in height (approximately 120 metres (390 ft)) and adorned "with all
precious substances". Faxian continued: "Of all the
stûpas and temples seen by the travelers, none can compare with this for beauty of form and strength."
The stupa was eventually destroyed by lightning, but was repaired several
times; it was still in existence at the time of Xuanzang's visit in 634 AD. A
jewelled casket containing relics of the Buddha, and an inscription identifying
Kanishka as the donor, existed at the ruined base of this giant stupa — the
casket was excavated, by a team supervised by Dr D.B. Spooner in 1909, from a
chamber under the very center of the stupa's base.
The Pashtuns began a conversion to Islam, following the early
annexation by the Arab Empire from Khurasan (in what is today Afghanistan and
northeastern Iran). In 1001, the Turkic ruler of the Ghaznavid Empire, Mahmud
of Ghazni, further expanded from Afghanistan into the Indian sub-continent.
The Afghan (Pashtun) emperor, Sher Shah Suri, turned Peshawar's renaissance
into a boom when he ran his Delhi-to-Kabul Shahi Road through the Khyber Pass
and Peshawar in the 16th century; Peshawar was later incorporated into the
