British officers once called Gingee the “Troy of the East,” not for its antiquity or legend, but for the challenge it posed to any force trying to breach its defenses. In Tamil Nadu’s Villupuram district, the fort spans three granite hillocks named Rajagiri, Krishnagiri and Chandrayandurg, each topped by a citadel. Walls stretch across the rocky spaces between them, and a 13 kilometre rampart outlines the entire complex.
Most of the present-day structures and the unified form were the work of the Gingee Nayakas in the sixteenth century, building over earlier fortifications, including that of Rajagiri under Ananta Kon in the 1190s.
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Chhatrapati Shivaji captured it from the Bijapur Sultanate in 1677 and integrated it into his southern line of strongholds. Jesuit missionary Andrew Breira, writing the following year, described the structural modifications under Maratha direction as precise enough to impress even trained European engineers. These additions later proved critical during a Mughal siege that continued for seven years. Over time, control passed to the Mughals, the French, and then the British, before it was reduced to a minor garrison and eventually abandoned by the 1820s.
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The fort was brought under official protection in 1921, when the Archaeological Survey of India declared it a National Monument. More than a century later, on 12 July 2025, Gingee was added to the UNESCO World Heritage list as part of the Maratha Military Landscapes. Among the twelve forts in the inscription, it is the only one situated outside Maharashtra.
