The Padmanabhaswamy treasure

The richest treasure ever found; one vault, guarded by serpents, still sealed

The Padmanabhaswamy Temple in Thiruvananthapuram, Kerala, is dedicated to Vishnu as Anantha Padmanabhaswamy, reclining in yogic sleep on the serpent Shesha, and is one of the 108 Divya Desams of the Sri Vaishnava tradition. It is bound up with the royal house of Travancore. On 17 January 1750 King Anizham Thirunal Marthanda Varma surrendered his kingdom to the deity and pledged that he and his heirs would rule as its servants; every king since has borne the title Sree Padmanabha Dasa, servant of Padmanabha. The family that won a rare Asian naval victory over a European power, downing a Dutch fleet in 1741, kept the temple when Travancore joined India.

Its wealth has gathered for centuries, from what one historian calls taxes, gifts from devotees, bribes and the looted wealth of conquered states. In 2011, on a devotee's petition, India's Supreme Court ordered a count of the treasure in the temple's underground vaults, labelled A to F. The press filled with reports of gold pots, rubies, jewelled crowns, gold chairs and a deity studded with diamonds, worth perhaps $20 billion, though the BBC cautioned that it was all speculation until the court's inventory came in. Nor was it the first look inside: a vault was opened for an inventory in 1931, its rusted locks broken after two and a half hours with an ambulance standing by, and officials found brass chests of old coins, more than 300 gold pots, and a six-chambered chest of diamonds, rubies and emeralds.

Vault B, the Mahabharata Kallara and by far the largest cellar, is believed unopened since the 1880s, and it carries the legend. Tradition holds that gods and sages dwell in it worshipping the deity, Narasimha guards it, and a serpent's image on it warns anyone who would open it. A travel writer of 1933 told of intruders who found the vaults infested with cobras and fled, a story that made the BBC correspondent's historian friends laugh. In August 2011 a four-day Ashtamangala Devaprasnam, held to discern the deity's will, declared Vault B a forbidden zone, and the royal family has called opening it a bad omen. In 2014 a report by the former auditor general Vinod Rai said its outer antechamber had been opened seven times since 1991.

Since 13 July 2020 the temple has been run by an administrative committee set up on the Supreme Court's directions.