Nalanda University

Nalanda University was established during the 5th century A.D. The university is considered the first residential university ever in the world. The university stands proof for the prominent role played by India in imparting knowledge. The university had 2000 teachers who taught over 10000 students from all parts of the world. The uniqueness of the place could be gauged by the fact that Buddha himself was a teacher here and Hieun-Tsang, Chinese traveler and a great scholar, was a student of this university. Red rocks were used in the construction, which is built in Kushana style of architecture. The remains excavated from the university ruins include stupas, ornamented panels, lecture halls and stairway.

Nalanda was an acclaimed Mahāvihāra, a large Buddhist monastery in ancient Magadha (modern-day Bihar), India. The site is located about 95 kilometres southeast of Patna near the town of Bihar Sharif, and was a centre of learning from the fifth century CE to c. 1200 CE.Historians often characterize Nalanda as a university.Amartya Sen has called it the oldest university in the world which "had been providing higher education to thousands of students from Asian countries for more than six hundred years... by the time the first European university was established in Bologna in 1088.

Nalanda flourished under the patronage of the Gupta Empire as well as under emperor Harsha and later still, under the rulers of the Pala Empire. At its peak, the school attracted scholars and students from as far away as Tibet, China, Korea, and Central Asia. It was very likely ransacked and destroyed by an army of the Muslim Mamluk Dynasty under Bakhtiyar Khilji in c. 1200 CE.