Shalamar Gardens

Interesting facts

In 1999 the 375-year-old hydraulic tanks that fed the fountains were torn down to widen the Grand Trunk Road along the garden's southern edge.

After the hydraulic works were lost, UNESCO placed the gardens and Lahore Fort on its List of World Heritage in Danger in 2000, removing them in 2012.

The fountains are spread unevenly across the terraces: roughly 105 on the upper level, 152 on the middle and 153 on the lowest.

The Chini Khana is a three-sided marble waterfall whose walls are pierced with small niches, filled with flower vases by day and camphor candles at night.

The twin Sawan and Bhadun pavilions take their names from the two months of the monsoon rains in the local calendar.

Work began in June 1641 and, according to the chronicles, the whole garden was finished in 17 months and 14 days.

Construction was run by the noble Khalilullah Khan with Mulla Alaul Maulk Tuni, while Ali Mardan Khan, a celebrated engineer, supervised the canal that supplied it.

The garden was long known as Farah Bakhsh, and the name Shalamar became standard only in the eighteenth century; Ranjit Singh briefly called it Shahla Bagh.

For generations the gardens hosted the annual Mela Chiraghan, Lahore's festival of lamps, until General Ayub Khan banned it there in 1958.

The walled enclosure covers about 16 hectares in all.

Why it is worth it

Behind a high brick wall on the eastern edge of Lahore lies one of the great pleasure gardens of the Mughal emperors — a rectangle 658 metres long and 258 metres wide, laid out on three terraces that step down one after another, each four to five metres below the last, and alive with more than four hundred fountains. The Shalamar Gardens were built for the Mughal emperor Shah Jahan and completed in 1642, about seventeen months after work began in 1641. In 1981 they were inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List together with Lahore Fort as the fullest expression of Mughal garden design.

The plan is a charbagh, the Persian paradise garden divided into four by water channels and raised walkways, a form the Mughals inherited from the Timurid gardens of Central Asia and Iran. Shah Jahan's inspiration was closer to home: the Shalimar garden his father Jahangir had made in Kashmir. In Kashmir the water fell naturally down a hillside; in flat Lahore it had to be engineered, and a canal more than 150 km long was dug to bring water to the site. The uppermost terrace, Farah Bakhsh — the Bestower of Pleasure — was reserved for the imperial harem; the middle terrace, part of Faiz Bakhsh, the Bestower of Goodness, was the emperor's own garden, with the most elaborate waterworks of any Mughal garden. There, water slides over carved marble cascades into a great pool with a pavilion set over it; among the garden's buildings are the Sawan Bhadun pavilions and the Khwabgah, or sleeping quarters. The lowest terrace, where the main entrance was, was open to nobles and at times to the public. The foliage and water kept the enclosure markedly cooler than the city in summer.

Later centuries were less kind: under Sikh rule much of the marble was carried away to Amritsar and the agate gate was stripped and sold, although Maharaja Ranjit Singh ordered repairs in 1806. The land had belonged to the Arain Mian family of Baghbanpura, who ceded it to Shah Jahan and kept custodianship of the garden for more than three centuries, until it was nationalised in 1962. Lahore itself, capital of Pakistan's Punjab province and the country's second-largest city, was one of the principal cities of the Mughal Empire, and the gardens remain one of its favourite places to stroll.

Getting there

The Shalamar Gardens stand beside the Grand Trunk Road in Baghbanpura, about 5 km east of the Delhi Gate of Lahore's Walled City. The nearest airport is Allama Iqbal International Airport (LHE), about 7 km away.

Shalamar Gardens

Interesting facts

Why it is worth it

Getting there

Plan your visit

On these lists

From the encyclopaedia