Journey
Baltistan and the Karakoram
Upstream from Chilas the Indus stops being a river of the plains and becomes a corridor through the highest mountains on earth, and everything here sits on it. The rocks by the water carry thousands of carvings left by traders and pilgrims crossing between Gandhara and the Tarim; the oldest Buddhist manuscripts in the subcontinent came out of a stupa at Gilgit; a seventh-century Buddha is cut into a cliff above it. Then in the fourteenth century Baltistan converted, and kept its Tibetan language while losing its Tibetan religion — which is why its mosques are built like gompas, with tiered timber roofs and carved pillars and no arches at all. The forts of the Mirs and rajas are the same carpentry applied to power. Almost all of them were ruins by 1980 and stand now because one trust spent twenty years restoring them.
Stops (11)
- Shatial & Chilas · 2nd c. BCE onward
The rocks along the river between Shatial and Chilas carry thousands of petroglyphs and inscriptions in Brahmi, Kharoshthi, Sogdian, Bactrian and Chinese — stupas, ibex, hunting scenes and the names of the people who cut them. This was the only practicable line between Gandhara and the Tarim basin, so merchants, monks and envoys all stopped at the same few places and left the largest concentration of rock inscriptions in Asia. The Diamer-Bhasha dam will flood a substantial part of it.
- Nanga Parbat · the corner of the Himalaya
The river is forced into its gorge because of this: at 8,126 metres Nanga Parbat is the western anchor of the Himalaya, and the Indus runs at about twelve hundred metres within twenty-five kilometres of the summit. That relief is among the steepest on earth, and the massif is rising about as fast as the river can cut, which is what produced the corridor everyone used. The Rupal face is the greatest continuous mountain wall anywhere; locally the mountain is Diamer, the king.
- Gilgit · found 1931
A stupa near Gilgit gave up a deposit of birch-bark manuscripts in 1931 — the oldest surviving Buddhist manuscripts in the subcontinent, in Sanskrit and Gandhari, including parts of the Lotus Sutra and the earliest known texts of several others. They survived because the climate is dry and cold, which is why the north-west's oldest books are here rather than in the plains that wrote them. The town was a node on the route, not a centre of composition.
- Kargah Buddha, Gilgit · 7th century
A standing Buddha cut some fifteen metres up a cliff in the Kargah nala west of the town, in a Kashmiri idiom, with the rock left rough around it. It is the most visible thing Buddhist Gilgit left, and the monastery it must have belonged to has never been found. Local story makes the figure a man-eating ogress pinned to the cliff by a holy man who warned that she would come down if the rock were ever cut away — which has probably helped keep it there.
- Hunza · Kharoshthi to Chinese
The Sacred Rock at Haldeikish in Hunza carries inscriptions in Kharoshthi, Brahmi, Sogdian and later scripts, left by people crossing the passes into the Tarim — a visitors' book cut into stone over a thousand years. Ibex are carved among the names, which in Hunza are hunters' marks. The rock sits directly on the old route, now beside the Karakoram Highway, so the modern road and the ancient one are the same line of least resistance.
- Baltit Fort, Hunza · seven centuries, and 1996
The seat of the Mirs of Hunza on a spur above Karimabad, built the way Baltistan builds: dry stone with timber cribbage laced horizontally through the walls against earthquakes, flat roofs, small high windows. Tradition says Balti craftsmen came with a princess married into Hunza and raised it. It was abandoned in 1945 when the Mir moved downhill, and restored by the Aga Khan Trust for Culture between 1990 and 1996 — the first conservation in the region done to an international standard rather than rebuilt in cement.
- Manthal Buddha Rock, Skardu · 8th century
A granite boulder on the edge of Skardu carved with a large seated Buddha surrounded by bodhisattvas, in the Kashmiri manner, with Brahmi and Tibetan inscriptions on the same rock and others nearby. It is the clearest surviving Buddhist monument in Baltistan, which was Buddhist and Tibetan-speaking before the fourteenth century and stayed Tibetan-speaking afterwards. The carving is therefore read today by people whose language is closer to the sculptor's than their religion is.
- Shigar Fort (Fong Khar) · 17th century, restored 2004
Fong Khar, the palace on the rock, built by the Amacha rajas in the valley that leads up towards the Baltoro glacier and K2. It is Balti building at its most accomplished — stone and timber cribbage with carved wooden pillars, lintels and balconies whose vocabulary came from Kashmir by way of Buddhist Baltistan. The Aga Khan Trust restored it between 1999 and 2004, deliberately leaving one wing as found so the carpentry can be seen conserved and unconserved in the same building.
- Khaplu Palace (Yabgo Khar) · c. 1840
Built for Raja Daulat Ali Khan of the Yabgo line immediately after the Dogra conquest destroyed the older fort on the ridge above — so it is what a Balti raja built once he was a feudatory rather than a ruler. The joinery is the same tradition as Shigar's, but the Kashmiri elements are noticeably more prominent and the plan is closer to a princely residence elsewhere in India. It is the last palace the Balti houses built as anything like rulers.
- Chaqchan Mosque, Khaplu · 1370
A few hundred metres from the palace, and five centuries older. Founded at the conversion of Baltistan and attached by tradition to Sayyid Alī Hamadānī, the Kubrawi missionary credited with converting Kashmir too. The name means miraculous. What is remarkable is the form: tiered timber roofs, carved wooden pillars, a verandah, and almost nothing of the arch-and-dome vocabulary a mosque of that date would have anywhere west of here. Islam arrived in the architectural language of the religion it replaced, because the carpenters were the same carpenters.
- Turtuk · and then 1971
The eastern end of the same world, and now in a different country. Turtuk was Baltistan until the 1971 war, when India took it, so its people are Balti-speaking Nurbakhshi Muslims living in Ladakh with relatives on the other side of the line of control. The language, the stone-and-timber houses, the apricot orchards and the polo run continuously across a border that families do not. Villagers learned which state they were in some days after the fact.