Place · raja's palace · Pakistan
Khaplu Palace (Yabgo Khar)
Built about 1840 for Raja Daulat Ali Khan of the Yabgo line, after the older fort on the ridge above Khaplu had been destroyed in the Dogra conquest of Baltistan. It is the last palace the Balti rajas built as rulers, and the woodwork — carved pillars, jharokha-like balconies, a painted reception room — records exactly the point at which Kashmiri and Tibetan carpentry traditions were being asked to produce something that also looked like a princely residence elsewhere in India.
- Function
- Authority & administration
- Confidence
- Established / referenced
- Location
- 35.152, 76.335
Worth knowing
The Dogra army that destroyed the fort above it in the 1840s was the same force, under Zorawar Singh's successors, that pushed on into western Tibet — so the palace is what Baltistan built immediately after losing its independence.
Connections (2)
- In the same set asShigar Fort (Fong Khar)
Shigar and Khaplu were the seats of two of the Balti royal houses, the Amacha and the Yabgo, and their buildings bracket the end of Balti independence. Shigar's Fong Khar is seventeenth-century, built while the rajas were sovereign. Khaplu's palace was built about 1840, immediately after the Dogra conquest destroyed the fort on the ridge above it — so it is what a Balti raja built once he was a feudatory rather than a ruler, with the Kashmiri elements of the woodwork noticeably more prominent.
- Site adjacencyChaqchan Mosque, Khaplu
The palace and the mosque stand within a few hundred metres at Khaplu and are built by the same tradition of carpenters. Chaqchan was founded in 1370, at the conversion of Baltistan, with tiered timber roofs and carved pillars that owe nothing to the arch-and-dome mosque of the Persianate world; the Yabgo palace of about 1840 uses the same joinery vocabulary for a princely residence five centuries later. The continuity of Balti woodwork across the change of religion is visible in one short walk.
On these journeys
Sources
Wikipedia, “Khaplu Palace”. Aga Khan Trust for Culture conservation reports (2005–11); Banat Gul Afridi, Baltistan on the Roof of the World.
Open Khaplu Palace (Yabgo Khar) in the repository →