Cigarette Card

Wills’s Cigarettes “Wonders of the Past” Cigarette Card #28 “Buddha’s Most Sacred Shrine, Buddh-Gaya”

Produced in 1926 by W. D. & H. O. Wills.

Issued by The Imperial Tobacco Company (of Great Britain & Ireland) Ltd.

Text on reverse of card reads:

“There is no other temple in India quite like Buddh-Gaya in Bihar. It marks the spot where Gautama, sitting beneath a bo-tree, received enlightenment and became “the Budd- ha” in the sixth century BC. Some 200 years later Asoka, the great Buddhist emperor, built a memorial shrine there, and about the beginning of our era the present enlarged temple was erected. A square terrace runs round the central pagoda, with a smaller pagoda at each corner, and the whole circuit is massed with small stone shrines, or “stupas,” put up by pious pilgrims who throng to the spot in thousands”