Place · colonial-era museum · Pakistan
Lahore Museum
Also known as Ajaib Ghar, ʿAjāʾib Ghar Lāhaur, Wonder House, Jubilee Museum
The Lahore Museum, founded in 1865 and moved in 1894 into an Indo-Saracenic building on The Mall designed by Bhai Ram Singh and John Lockwood Kipling, is Pakistan's largest museum. Its collections run from the Indus Valley Civilisation through Gandhara to the Mughal, Sikh and British periods, and its Gandharan Buddhist sculpture is headed by the celebrated Fasting Buddha. At Partition about forty per cent of the collection went to India.
- Date
- 1865–None
- Function
- Learning & scholarship
- Confidence
- Established / referenced
- Location
- 31.568, 74.308
Worth knowing
The Zamzama gun, cast at Lahore in 1757 for the Durrani vizier, stands in front, and Rudyard Kipling, whose father was one of the museum's earliest curators, opened his novel Kim with the boy astride it outside the 'Wonder House'.
About the place
Placed at the Wikidata coordinates for the museum on The Mall.
Connections (3)
- Site withinLahore
The Lahore Museum stands on The Mall in Lahore's colonial-era core. It began in 1865–66 in a hall built for the 1864 Punjab Exhibition, on the site of today's Tollinton Market, and moved in 1894 into a new building raised as a memorial of Queen Victoria's Golden Jubilee, designed by Bhai Ram Singh and John Lockwood Kipling and built under Ganga Ram. The Zamzama gun, cast at Lahore in 1757, stands directly in front of it.
- Historical linkGandhara
The Lahore Museum holds one of the great collections of Gandharan Buddhist art, with Greco-Buddhist sculpture from the Indo-Greek and Gandhara kingdoms and relics of the Graeco-Bactrian period. Its most prized object is the Fasting Buddha from Gandhara, showing the Buddha wasted by his austerities. It was the most visited museum in Pakistan among foreigners in 2016 and 2017, overtaken in 2018 only by the Taxila Museum.
- Historical linkChandigarh
In 1948, after the partition of Punjab, the Lahore Museum's collection was divided between Pakistan and India. Lahore kept about 60 per cent; the rest went to India and was eventually housed in the Government Museum and Art Gallery at Chandigarh, built for the purpose. The division followed the logic that produced Chandigarh itself, a new capital built for an Indian Punjab that had lost Lahore, its old seat, to Pakistan.
Sources
Wikipedia, "Lahore Museum", "Zamzama".
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