Mandav Heritage

Mandu 3D Heritage Map is a free, interactive 3D map of Mandu (Mandav), the 15th-century capital of the Malwa Sultanate in Madhya Pradesh. It shows the plateau as a solid block of real terrain, with 39 palaces, mosques, tombs, gates and stepwells modelled on it in three dimensions.

It is for travellers planning a visit, students and teachers, heritage enthusiasts, and anyone curious about a place that deserves more attention than it gets.

Visitors can fly around the plateau, tilt and rotate the view, and click any monument to read its history, see its photographs, and check the facts at a glance. A companion timeline follows fourteen centuries of Mandu, from the Paramara hill fort to the Sultanate, the Mughal period and the ruin that followed. There is no login, no app to install and nothing to pay.

Mandu is one of the largest fortified cities of its age, but most of what is written about it is scattered across survey reports, old chronicles and travel notes. Online, it usually appears as a short list of names with a few photos. There was no single place where you could see how the monuments sit on the plateau, how far apart they are, and where they fall in the story.

Several buildings had no reliable location in any public map. I wanted one open, permanent page that puts the place, the buildings and the history together.

The map is built with MapLibre GL JS and Three.js. Everything is plain HTML, CSS and JavaScript with no backend, no build step and no paid services, so it can stay online for free indefinitely.

• Terrain: real elevation data, with the plateau cut out as a raised block on a flat base.
• Monuments: each building is generated procedurally by type, placed at its surveyed coordinate and scaled against the terrain.
• Coordinates: taken from OpenStreetMap and cross-checked against a second source wherever possible. Some monuments were located by walking the site and reading the GPS tags from my own photographs.
• History: researched from Archaeological Survey of India records, the Tarikh-i-Firishta, the Tuzuk-i-Jahangiri and standard scholarship. Where history is uncertain or disputed, the site says so instead of stating it as fact.

• Locations: OpenStreetMap contributors, plus my own GPS-tagged field photographs.
• Terrain and imagery: open terrain tiles, satellite imagery and map styles, each credited on the map.
• National outline: Datameet, based on Survey of India boundaries.
• Photographs: Creative Commons or public-domain images from Wikimedia Commons, each credited to its photographer with its licence. Photos marked "Nikunj Jambu" are my own.
• History text: written by me from the published sources above. Each timeline entry lists its sources.

If you spot an error or an attribution problem, please tell me and I will fix it.

The map is still growing. I am adding more monuments and photographs as I can verify them, and there is more to come. If you have photographs, GPS locations or corrections for any Mandu monument, I would like to hear from you.