Place · island palace · India
Lake Palace, Udaipur
Also known as Jag Niwas, Lake Palace, Lake Palace — Udaipur, Udaipur
Jag Niwas, built by Maharana Jagat Singh II in 1746 on a rock in Lake Pichola as a summer retreat, with courtyards, a lily pond and a black-and-white marble floor, oriented so that its east front takes the sunrise across the water. It was a working palace of the Mewar household for two hundred years.
- Date
- 1746
- Function
- Authority & administration
- Confidence
- Established / referenced
- Location
- 24.575, 73.680
Worth knowing
European officers' families from Neemuch were sheltered on the island during the 1857 rising, and the boats were destroyed so that nobody could reach them. It opened as a hotel in 1963, which is what happened to a great many of these buildings once the privy purses were withdrawn, and it is still owned by the Mewar family.
Connections (1)
- Site withinUdaipur
Lake Palace, Udaipur sits inside Udaipur and forms one piece of its layered sacred, royal or civic landscape. The city carries this entry as one of the sites that make its urban fabric legible — a shrine, monument, institution or craft tradition specifically anchored at this location — and the city's broader history reads better when the stop is seen in its context rather than in isolation. The surrounding streets, markets and other heritage ensembles around it belong to the same single city.
On these journeys
Sources
Wikipedia, “Lake Palace”. Maharana of Mewar Charitable Foundation records; Giles Tillotson, The Rajput Palaces (1987).
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