Things to do.

Thanjavur, for a city of three hundred thousand, holds an unreasonable density of things worth seeing. The Big Temple is the obvious one — and it is the right place to start. What most visitors miss is that the temple is the centrepiece of a wider monumental city, not the whole of it. The palace down the road is older in parts than the temple itself.

This is a working sequence. It assumes you have a day and a half at a minimum, three days at the upper end, and an interest in seeing the city rather than ticking off a list. The order below is the order that respects the light — temple at dawn or sunset, palace at midday, library in the cool of the late afternoon.

The Big Temple, first.

Brihadeeswara opens at six in the morning and closes at twelve-thirty for the midday pooja cycle. The first hour is the best hour. The granite is still cool, the photographers are only beginning to arrive, and the priests are running the dawn worship. Allow two hours for a first visit; longer if you want to walk the inner prakara and read the plinth inscriptions.

The evening session — sixteen-hundred to twenty-thirty — gives you the gopuram in the low westerly light, the vimana lit from below, and the temple in its devotional pace. The difference between a tourist visit and a tourist-plus-worshipper visit is striking; the latter is what the temple was made for.

The Maratha palace.

Two kilometres east of the temple is a sixteenth-century palace complex begun by the Nayaks of Thanjavur and expanded, after 1674, by the Marathas. The compound holds five distinct attractions — durbar hall, bell tower, art gallery, bronze gallery, and the Saraswathi Mahal Library — each ticketed separately and most worth the small fee.

The durbar hall, with its painted columns and lacquered ceiling, is the headline. The bell tower will give you the only elevated view of the temple skyline. The art gallery upstairs holds the largest collection of Chola bronzes outside Chennai; the lighting is poor but the sculpture is exceptional.

Saraswathi Mahal.

Inside the palace, in a quiet wing of its own, is the Saraswathi Mahal Library — founded by the Nayak kings in the sixteenth century, expanded by Serfoji II in the eighteenth, and still operating today as a research institution. Forty-nine thousand manuscripts on palm-leaf and paper; the largest collection of Sanskrit and Marathi medical texts in India; a small museum of curiosities that includes Serfoji's correspondence with the British East India Company.

The public can visit the museum and a sampling of manuscripts on rotating display. The working reading rooms are not open without a scholar's pass. An hour is sufficient unless you read Tamil, Sanskrit or Marathi — in which case you may not leave.

The bronze gallery.

The Tamil Nadu state department of museums maintains a small but world-significant gallery of Chola bronzes inside the palace complex. The lost-wax cast Natarajas — Shiva as cosmic dancer — are the headline pieces; the lesser-known Parvatis and Ganeshas are arguably more refined. The lighting is regrettable. The work is not.

Thanjavur painting workshops.

Thanjavur painting — the gold-leaf, gem-encrusted devotional art form of the Maratha court — is still made in workshops scattered across the city. The serious workshops are not on the tourist circuit; the tourist-circuit ones sell printed reproductions. Ask at your hotel for a recommendation in the Karanthai or Brihadeswara Nagar quarters; expect to spend an hour with the master and pay anything from a few thousand rupees for a small icon to a lakh for a large studio commission.

The bazaars.

The bazaar quarter between the temple and the railway station is the most rewarding place to walk in the city. Filter-coffee houses, brass-vessel makers, sari shops, bronze-shop seconds sellers, and the morning vegetable market on the south side of the temple all sit within ten minutes of each other. Take an hour at sunset, walk slowly, drink one coffee per quarter you pass through.

Day-trips from the city.

Three options are worth the road time. Gangaikonda Cholapuram, an hour north, is the second of the three UNESCO Chola temples and is almost always empty. Airavatesvara at Darasuram, thirty kilometres further north on the same road, is the third. Both can be combined into a long day from Thanjavur with a Kumbakonam lunch in the middle.

Trichy, sixty kilometres west, offers the Rockfort and the Srirangam temple complex — a different style and a useful comparison. The Kaveri at Tiruvaiyaru, a short drive from Thanjavur, is the village of the saint-composer Tyagaraja and a worthwhile detour for any visitor interested in Carnatic music.

How to plan it.

For a single day in the city, do Brihadeeswara at dawn, the palace and library after breakfast, and the bazaars at sunset. For two days, add the Chola circuit. For three, give Tiruvaiyaru and Trichy a day each. The city rewards a slower pace than the standard guidebook itinerary suggests.