The Taj Mahal rises on the banks of the Yamuna River in Agra, built in the seventeenth century by the Mughal emperor Shah Jahan as a mausoleum for his wife Mumtaz Mahal. The film walks through how it was made: more than 20,000 workers and craftsmen on site, millions of bricks fired and stacked into a support structure that was then buried entirely under the white marble facing that still shows on the surface. It traces the building's design as a blend of Persian, Indian, and Islamic architectural traditions, pointing out the calligraphy bands, the floral inlay work, and the symmetry of the gardens and reflecting pools laid out in front of the tomb. The film also covers the legends attached to the site over the centuries, including the poets who nicknamed it a teardrop on the cheek of time, and treats those stories as folklore rather than fact. What holds the film together is the construction itself, a project large enough that its labor and engineering are as much the subject as the love story behind it.