“The Secret of the Temple”

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“Maybe once in a thousand years something like this will happen–finding such massive wealth…”

By Jake Halpern, from the April 30, 2012, New Yorker

According to legend, treasure was sealed in the temple vaults, and Padmanabhan, who was passionate about history, knew that in centuries past maharajas had performed a ceremony in which they weighed local princes approaching adulthood, then donated to the temple an equivalent weight in gold.  Padmanabhan believed that these riches were still hidden in the basement, uncounted and unguarded.

Padmanabhan(‘s) … home and his law office are on historic Brahmin Street, just outside the gates of the temple, which has a monumental seven-story tower whose pale granite facade is a tapestry of stone, etched with ornate images of gods, nymphs, sprites, and demons.  On the day that I had arranged to meet Padmanabhan, in mid-October, I found him in the middle of the street, barefoot, in a downpour.  He was staring at the temple, as if in a trance. … After several minutes, Padmanabhan looked at me, smiled, and explained that he had been praying.

Padmanabhan alleged that a series of kallaras–treasure vaults–existed beneath the temple …. The temple’s executive, Sasidharan Nair, (insisted) … there was nothing beneath the temple except a few unused rooms “covered with cobwebs and dust.”

Early one morning in October, 2008, as the temple prepared to hold its biggest annual festival, Padmanabhan accompanied the two commissioners into a storage area behind the sanctum sanctorum.

The doors to Vaults A and B required multiple keys…. The observers used the keys to open the metal-grilled door to Vault B, and discovered a sturdy wooden door just behind it.  They opened this door as well, and encountered a third door, made of iron, which was jammed shut.  So they turned their attention to Vault A.  Once again, they unlocked two outer doors, one of metal and the other of wood.  They entered a small room with a huge rectangular slab on the floor, like a toppled tombstone.  It took five men more than thirty minutes to remove the slab.  Beneath it they found a narrow, pitch-black passage, barely wide enough for an adult to get through, leading down a short flight of steps.   ….

“When they removed the granite stone, it was almost perfectly dark, except for a small amount of light coming in through the doorway behind us.  As I looked into the darkened vault, what I saw looked like stars glittering in a night sky when there is no moon.  Diamonds and gems were sparkling, reflecting what little light there was.  Much of the wealth had originally been stored in wooden boxes, but, with time, the boxes had cracked and turned to dust.  And so the gems of gold were just sitting in piles on the dusty floor.  It was amazing.”

According to Rajan, the observers instructed temple employees to haul everything from Vault A upstairs, for inspection.  It took fifteen men all day.  Rajan said that beholding the treasure was a “divine moment.”

There were countless gold rings, bangles, and lockets, many encrusted with gems.  And there were gold chains, each studded with jewels and eighteen feet long–the length of the main idol.  Rajan told me that coin experts estimated that the vault held approximately a hundred thousand gold coins, spanning centuries of trade:  Roman, Napoleonic, Mughal, Dutch.  He also described seeing a set of solid-gold body armor, known as an angi, built to adorn the main idol.

So far, no one has formally calculated the value of the treasure found in Vault A.   But Harikumar, the temple’s executive–who has now seen the hoard on at least two occasions–has estimated that it is worth at least twenty billion dollars.  Ananda Bose, the former director of the National Museum in New Delhi…had done some research on other famed hoards–including those found in the tombs of the Egyptian pyramids–and said that none of them appeared to rival the temple’s treasure.  “Maybe once in a thousand years something like this will happen–finding such massive wealth,” he told me.

Except for the most extremely ascetic among us gold holds an allure … and an intrinsic value.   Even the sudden uncovering of a $20 billion hoard does not significantly alter the world gold stock nor materially shift the needle of its monetary value….

When the Economist‘s New York bureau chief Michael Bishop says ”

Gold does seem to in a way  hearken back to another age, doesn’t it.  But I think the reason it has come back into fashion in the last ten years as we write In Gold We Trust people have lost faith in the 20th century religion of government backed fiat money.  … We don’t trust this any more.  They are going back to the old religion of gold.

it gives one a distinct whiff of the almost theological “20th century religion” fanaticism of gold-standard deniers….