Place · Mughal fort & garden · Pakistan

Lahore Fort & Shalimar

Function

Authority & administration

Patron dynasty

Mughal

Confidence

Established / referenced

Location

31.588, 74.315

Connections (16)

• Imperial administration ofRed Fort, Delhi

  Delhi and Lahore were the two poles of Mughal north India: the Punjab capital with its Picture Wall of glazed tile and the Shalimar terraces, and the Shahjahanabad citadel. The court moved between them, and Lahore was where the empire faced Kabul and Kandahar. After 1947 the pair was cut by a border, and two cities that had governed one region for four centuries became capitals of different countries.

• Power passed toChillianwala

  Chillianwala in 1849 was a bloody draw that shook British confidence badly — colours lost, guns abandoned, a public outcry in London — and the annexation of Punjab followed within months after Gujrat. Lahore, the Mughal north-western capital and then Ranjit Singh's, passed to the Company, and the Koh-i-Noor went with it to Queen Victoria.

• Power passed toKarnal

  The Koh-i-Noor left Delhi with Nadir Shah in 1739, passed after his assassination to his Afghan general Ahmad Shah Durrani, and came back into India at Lahore in 1813 when Ranjit Singh extracted it from the exiled Shah Shuja in return for sheltering him. It was surrendered to the Company on the annexation of Punjab in 1849 and sent to Queen Victoria, arriving by way of a Bombay steamer.

• AnalogueHarmandir Sāhib (Golden Temple)

  Lahore and Amritsar are thirty miles apart on the same road and were each about a third to a half of the other community in 1941. Both were emptied of that community within months of August 1947, in opposite directions, and refilled with refugees from the other side. The trains that ran between them that autumn are the single most repeated image of Partition, and they ran both ways and arrived in the same condition.

• Power passed toTower of London

  The Koh-i-Noor was taken from the Lahore Treasury by Dalhousie and John Lawrence after the 1849 British annexation of Punjab (Treaty of Lahore, 29 March 1849), shipped to Bombay under armed guard, and transported to England in 1850 in a sealed iron box in HMS Medea's dispatch room — an operation Dalhousie's own letters describe as the most anxious of his career. It was presented to Queen Victoria on 3 July 1850, displayed at the 1851 Great Exhibition where it was thought disappointingly dull, and then recut from 186 to 105 carats in 1852 before being set in the British Crown Jewels at the Tower of London where it has remained.

• Imperial administration ofRohtas Fort

  Rohtas was built by Sher Shah in 1541 to hold the Punjab against Humayun returning through the passes and against the Gakhar tribes who would help him. The fort and Lahore are one Punjab security system: a fortress in the north-west, a garrison capital in the south-east, and a road between them. When the Mughals took Lahore under Akbar in 1566 they inherited Rohtas as well, and both stayed on the same imperial account book for a century and a half.

• Route adjacencyMughal Gardens of Kashmir

  Lahore to Kashmir over the Pir Panjal was the imperial summer road, and the court moved up it as a city of several hundred thousand. Bernier went with it in 1665 and described both the march and the valley at the top of it, which makes him the first European witness to the Mughal gardens, the saffron fields and the shawl looms in one journey.

• Site adjacencyBadshahi Mosque, Lahore

  The Badshahi Mosque and the Lahore Fort face each other across the Hazuri Bagh, and the relationship is deliberate: Aurangzeb built the mosque in 1671–73 directly opposite the fort's Alamgiri Gate, which he also built, so that the imperial residence and the imperial congregation addressed one another across a single garden. The pairing of fort and Friday mosque on one axis is the standard Mughal statement of sovereignty, made at Delhi and Agra before this, and Lahore's is the last and largest instance of it.

• Route adjacencyShahdara

  Shahdara is the Lahore bank of the Ravi opposite the walled city, and it was the imperial suburb: Jahāngīr's tomb, the Akbari Sarai, Asif Khān's tomb and Nur Jahān's all stand in that one group, reached from the fort by crossing the river. Jahāngīr spent more time at Lahore than at any other capital and died on the road back from Kashmir, so the tomb is where the court's northern axis ended — the Kashmir road, the Shalimar gardens and the fort all on the same line out of the city.

• Patronage networkHirān Mīnār, Sheikhupura

  Hirān Mīnār at Sheikhupura and the Shalimar gardens at Lahore are both the Mughal court arranging water and ground for its own pleasure within a day of the capital, and Jahāngīr laid out the first in 1606. The tank at Hirān Mīnār has ramps cut into its corners so that game could walk down and drink, which is the same instinct as a garden terrace and a channel: a landscape engineered to deliver an experience. The difference is that this one was built around a tame antelope's grave.

• Site adjacencyAttock Fort

  Attock is where the northern highway crosses the Indus, and Lahore is the Punjab capital it feeds into — one fort at the mountain gate, one city at the plain's centre, and a hundred and eighty kilometres between them. Akbar built Attock Fort in 1581 to hold that crossing while his empire's Punjab stretch was administered from Lahore Fort of 1566. Nādir Shāh, Ahmad Shāh Durrānī, Ranjīt Singh and the British Indian army all moved between the two points on that road.

• AnalogueBala Hissar, Peshawar

  Lahore and Peshawar both hand their citadel to each successive power, and both citadels stand on the mound of the city beneath them. Each was Mughal, then Sikh — Ranjīt Singh at Lahore, Hari Singh Nalwa rebuilding Peshawar's as Sumergarh in 1834 — then British, and each is still in official hands rather than open ground. The difference is what they became: Lahore Fort is a world heritage site with the Shalimar gardens, and Bala Hissar is the headquarters of the Frontier Corps.

• Successor capital ofChandigarh

  Chandigarh exists because Lahore does not belong to India. Lahore had been the capital of Punjab under the Mughals, under Ranjīt Singh and under the British, and the fort and Shalimar gardens are what that long tenure left; in 1947 the province was cut in two and the capital went west with the Muslim majority. East Punjab was left governing from Shimla until a new capital could be built on farmland, which is the rarest thing on this map: a city with a date of birth and a reason.

• River adjacencyParushnī / Irāvatī / Ravi

  Lahore sits on the Ravi two hundred kilometres upstream of Harappa, and was the capital of Punjab under the Mughals, under Ranjīt Singh and under the British. The fort and the Shalimar gardens were laid out on the river’s bank; the channel has since moved away from the old walls, and the reach below the city is now among the most polluted in the basin.

• Site withinLahore

  Lahore Fort & Shalimar lies within Lahore — the two sites sit about 5 km apart, well inside the city's historical boundary and part of the same urban or peri-urban landscape. Lahore Fort & Shalimar is one of the specific sites that give Lahore its layered character, and reads differently when seen as a stop within the larger city rather than as an isolated monument on an open map. The surrounding neighbourhoods, roads and other heritage ensembles belong to the same single urban fabric.

• Located atKoh-i-Noor

  The Koh-i-Noor was formally surrendered at Lahore Fort on 29 March 1849 under Article III of the Last Treaty of Lahore, which read: 'The gem called the Koh-i-Noor, which was taken from Shah Sooja-ool-moolk by Maharajah Ranjeet Singh, shall be surrendered by the Maharajah of Lahore to the Queen of England.' The lead signatory for the eleven-year-old Duleep Singh was his commander-in-chief Tej Singh. The Governor-General James Broun-Ramsay, Marquess of Dalhousie received the Koh-i-Noor from Dr John Spencer Login (Governor of the Citadel) under a receipt dated 7 December 1849 in the presence of Henry Lawrence, C.G. Mansel, John Lawrence and Henry Elliot of the Punjab Board of Administration.

On these journeys

• The Mughal line
• The Grand Trunk Road — Kabul to Chittagong
• Journey of Koh-i-Noor
• François Bernier — physician at the Mughal court (1658–68)
• Decolonisation, partition and integration
• Punjab before partition — five rivers, one landscape

Sources

Fort and Shalamar Gardens in Lahore — UNESCO

• Wikipedia