A thousand years ago, a king ruled central India who could compose a verse of philosophy before breakfast, settle a border war by noon, and spend the evening arguing astronomy with the scholars he had gathered at his own university. His name was Bhoja, and centuries after his death, people across India were still comparing anything unexpectedly grand to him. Few kings have left behind so strange and rich a legacy: temples, dams, a language named after one of his towns, and a proverb that outlived his entire dynasty.

This book tells his story in full for the first time as a single, flowing narrative. It follows Bhoja from a boyhood nearly cut short by a jealous uncle's suspicion, through decades of wars fought on five different frontiers, to his years as the most learned monarch India ever produced, one credited with dozens of surviving books on subjects ranging from grammar to medicine to the movement of the stars. Along the way are the legends that made him famous long after his death: the beggar who out-argued him at his own palace gate, the engineers who raised a lake still visible from space, and the unfinished temple holding what may be the largest Shiva lingam ever carved.

Drawing on inscriptions, medieval chronicles, and the work of historians who have spent careers piecing Bhoja's life back together, this book does not shy away from the places where legend and history pull in different directions. It tells you plainly which stories are confirmed by stone and which survive only because they were too good not to tell.

Part history, part legend, and part detective story about how a reputation gets built one poem, one war, and one temple at a time, this is the tale of a king who wanted to be remembered, and got exactly what he wished for.