The pool that gives Amritsar its name, amrit sarovar or pool of nectar, was excavated on land the fourth Guru, Ram Das, acquired in the 1570s, and the settlement that grew around it was known at first simply as Ramdaspur, the city of Ram Das. His successor Guru Arjan built a temple in the middle of the water and had a causeway laid to reach it. The building sits lower than the surrounding walkway, so a visitor descends to enter rather than climbing, and it opens on all four sides, a deliberate refusal of the single ceremonial entrance and the single permitted caste. In 1604 Guru Arjan installed there the volume he had compiled from the hymns of his predecessors and of Hindu and Muslim poets, the Adi Granth, which is carried into the temple each morning and taken to its resting place each night in a procession that has not stopped since.
The gold that gives the building its English name was applied in the early nineteenth century under Ranjit Singh, more than two hundred years after it was raised. Continuous singing of the scripture goes on inside from before dawn until late at night, and the free kitchen beside the complex serves anyone who sits down in line for it, without charge and without asking who they are. That combination, a building on low ground open at four sides, scripture rather than an image at the centre, and food given to strangers, is the argument the place makes in physical form.