Short answers, pulled from the story.
Gautama Buddha attained parinirvana in Kushinagar, a town now in Uttar Pradesh, India. According to the Mahāparinibbāṇa Sutta, he entered a grove of sala trees, lay down on his right side, and died shortly after completing a months-long journey from Rājagṛha.
A Brahmin named Drona divided the Buddha's ashes into eight portions, distributing them to Ajātasattu king of Magadha, the Licchavis of Vesāli, the Sakyas of Kapilavastu, the Bulis of Allakappa, the Koliyas of Rāmagāma, the brahmin of Veṭhadīpa, the Mallas of Pāvā, and the Malla King of Kushinagar. Drona kept the cremation vessel himself, and the Moriyas of Pipphalivana received the remaining funeral pyre ash.
Alexander Cunningham identified the ruins of Kushinagar as the site of the Buddha's parinirvana during archaeological excavations in 1861-1862. He was the first archaeologist to make this identification, working at the Matha Kuar shrine and the Ramabhar stupa.
The reclining Buddha statue in the Parinirvana Temple is carved from a single block of red sandstone. It measures 6.10 metres in length and depicts the Buddha lying on his right side with his head to the north and feet to the south, in the position he held at the moment of parinirvana.
Buddhist monks fled Kushinagar around 1200 CE to escape an invading Muslim army. The site decayed through the subsequent period of Islamic rule in India and fell into such disrepair that a 19th-century visitor mistook its ruins for the fortress of a local divinity.
Kushinagar became a separate district of Uttar Pradesh on the 13th of May 1994. Before that date it had remained part of the district of Deoria following Indian independence.