Almost everything known about Trowulan at its height comes from two sources: a Javanese poem and a Chinese traveler's account. The Nagarakretagama, composed in 1365 by the court poet Mpu Prapanca, describes a royal compound surrounded by thick, high walls of red brick. Huge doors of decorated iron opened onto the main gate in the north wall. Inside lay nested courtyards, each more exclusive than the last: first religious buildings and pavilions beside canals where people bathed, then rows of terraced houses for palace servants, then a great hall where petitioners waited, and finally the king's own quarters on decorated red-brick bases with ornately carved wooden pillars. A 15th-century Chinese source adds practical detail: the palace walls stood more than 10 meters high, houses inside rose on pillars to heights of 10 to 13 meters, and wooden floors were covered with fine mats. Common people outside the walls lived under roofs of straw.

Two gateways survive at Trowulan, and each tells a different story. The Bajang Ratu is a paduraksa gate, an enclosed archway that rises 16.5 meters in a slender, elegant profile adorned with bas-reliefs depicting scenes from the Sri Tanjung legend and the Ramayana. Folk tradition links it to Jayanegara, the second Majapahit king, who supposedly fell from the gate as a child, earning it the name "dwarf monarch." A short distance away stands Wringin Lawang, the Banyan Tree Gate, an entirely different kind of structure. This is a candi bentar, a split gateway: a single temple form sliced in half to create two mirroring towers with a passage between them. At 15.5 meters tall and built on a base of 13 by 11 meters, it is one of the oldest and largest surviving split gates from the Majapahit era. It has no doors and offers no defensive function. Its purpose was purely ceremonial, designed to create a sense of grandeur for anyone entering what many historians believe was the compound of Gajah Mada, the empire's legendary prime minister.

Trowulan's archaeological sites resist easy categorization. Tikus Temple, discovered in 1914, earned its name because the excavation initially resembled a rat-breeding enclosure. Restored in 1985 and 1989, the site turned out to be a petirtaan, a ritual bathing pool, its principal structure modeled on the mythical Mount Mahameru. The complex takes the form of a sunken rectangular basin of red brick, with steps descending from the north and terraced foundations that once supported concentric turrets around a central peak. Not far away lies Kolam Segaran, a rectangular pool measuring 800 by 500 meters whose name derives from the Javanese word segara, meaning sea. Discovered in 1926 by Henri Maclaine Pont beneath layers of dirt and mud, the pool was likely the city's freshwater reservoir, essential for sustaining the dense urban population through the dry season. Local tradition holds that it also served as a training ground for Majapahit soldiers and a place to entertain foreign envoys.

The ruins at Trowulan reveal not just a political capital but an industrial city. One hamlet is still called Kemasan, from the Javanese word mas, meaning gold. Goldsmiths worked imported gold from Sumatra, Borneo, and Sulawesi using lost-wax casting techniques, and their tools have been found alongside finished ornaments. Bronze workers at Pakis village left behind clay crucibles and stone molds used to cast uang gobog, large coins or amulets. Around 1300, Majapahit adopted Chinese bronze coins as its official currency, replacing the gold and silver that had circulated for centuries. The shift to small-denomination coinage suggests a sophisticated market economy of specialized occupations and wages. Perhaps the most revealing artifacts are the terracotta piggy banks, clay figures with coin slots in their backs. The Javanese word celengan, meaning piggy bank or savings, derives from celeng, the word for pig. Fourteen centuries have not changed that association.

Trowulan's greatest threat has always been its own ground. Much of the ancient city lies buried under meters of mud and volcanic debris deposited by eruptions of Mount Kelud and flooding from the Brantas River. Excavations have revealed two and sometimes three layers of dwellings stacked on top of one another, each buried by successive catastrophes. In 2008, the Indonesian government proposed building a Majapahit Park on the site, but construction was halted when historians protested that digging foundations would destroy the very archaeology the park was meant to celebrate. Islamic tombstones found in the Troloyo hamlet, dating from 1350 to 1478, confirm that a Muslim community thrived within the Hindu-Buddhist capital itself, evidence of the religious diversity that characterized the empire. Locals still make pilgrimages to what they believe is the tomb of Raden Wijaya, the founder of Majapahit, every Legi Friday. The past at Trowulan is not preserved behind glass. It is underfoot.