Place · Mughal charbagh gardens · India
Mughal Gardens of Kashmir
The six surviving Mughal gardens of Kashmir in the Srinagar valley — Shalimar Bagh (1619 by Jahangir for his wife Nur Jahan), Nishat Bagh (1633 by Asaf Khan, Nur Jahan's brother), Chashme Shahi (1632 by Shah Jahan), Pari Mahal (1640 by Dara Shikoh), Verinag (1620 by Jahangir) and Achabal Bagh (1620s by Nur Jahan) — the Persian charbagh adapted to a Himalayan valley's meltwater topography. The gardens use terraced ascent, stepped water-cascades (chadar), fountain beds and axial channels fed by snowmelt springs rather than the mechanical waterwheels used in Mughal plains gardens. The six gardens are on UNESCO's tentative list since 2010 as the Mughal Gardens in Kashmir serial nomination. The 2014 Kashmir floods damaged several; restoration is ongoing.
- Function
- Authority & administration
- Confidence
- Established / referenced
- Location
- 34.120, 74.880
Connections (6)
- Architectural modelHumayun's Tomb
Humayun's Tomb was inscribed in 1993 and the Kashmir gardens are still on the list, and they are two applications of the same charbagh idea: a walled quartered garden around a tomb, and a terraced garden running down a hillside to a lake with no tomb in it at all. The second is the fuller statement of Mughal landscape design and the harder one to bound for a nomination.
- PatronageVerīnāg
Jahangir walled the Verinag spring in an octagon of stone and laid a garden around it, and the Mughal gardens of Kashmir — Shalimar, Nishat, Achabal, Chashma Shahi — are all built on springs of this kind. Mughal landscape design in the valley is hydraulic before it is horticultural: it takes an existing sacred spring and gives it an architecture.
- Route adjacencyLahore Fort & Shalimar
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.
- PatronageSrinagar papier-mâché and khatamband
Zain-ul-Abidin sent craftsmen to Samarkand in the fifteenth century and brought Persian masters back, and the shawl, the carpet, the papier-mâché and the woodwork all date their present form from his reign; the Mughals then added the gardens two centuries later. Kashmir's crafts and its landscape design are both imports naturalised so completely that they now define the place.
- Site withinSrinagar
The Mughal Gardens of Kashmir — Shalimar Bagh, Nishat Bagh, Chashme Shahi, Verinag and the smaller ones — lie on the eastern shore of Dal Lake in Srinagar, built between 1619 and 1634 under Jahangir, Nur Jahan and Shah Jahan as the summer court moved to the valley. The Mughal charbagh adapted to a Himalayan slope and glacier-fed stream rather than the Persian plain is the defining Srinagar typology and the central reason the city is a UNESCO Tentative List site.
- Route adjacencyRohtang Pass
Rohtang Pass is the historical road from the Kullu Valley into Lahaul and Spiti — the overland connection between the Hindu Himalayas of Himachal and the Buddhist Himalayas beyond. For centuries the pass was closed six months of each year, which gave the Lahauli culture its distinctiveness: a Tibetan-adjacent Buddhist population a hundred kilometres from the Mughal Kashmir gardens. The 2020 Atal Tunnel ended that annual isolation after millennia.
On these journeys
Sources
List of World Heritage Sites in India — Wikipedia
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