Dhauli Hills

A short drive south of the city, Dhauli rises above the left bank of the Daya, and is held to be where the Kalinga war was fought and where it ended. Eleven of Ashoka's fourteen rock edicts are cut into the stone here in Brahmi, around 260 BCE — the ones in which an emperor who had just won records his remorse at the cost, and turns to Buddhism. Above them a life-size elephant emerges from the living rock, the earliest Buddhist sculpture known in Odisha. On the hill opposite stands the white Shanti Stupa, raised in the early 1970s by the Japan Buddha Sangha with its Kalinga counterpart, its dome carrying five umbrella forms and reliefs of the Buddha's life around the base.