Place · route city & provincial capital · Pakistan

Quetta

Function

Travel & migration

Confidence

Established / referenced

Location

30.196, 67.017

Worth knowing

The earthquake of 31 May 1935 destroyed almost the entire city in about half a minute and killed somewhere between thirty and sixty thousand people — by most counts the deadliest in South Asian history — so almost nothing standing in Quetta is older than that morning.

Connections (6)

• Route adjacencyBolan Pass

  Quetta exists because of the Bolan. The pass is the only practicable way from the Indus plains up onto the Balochistan plateau, and the city sits at the head of it where the road forks for Kandahar. That is why the British, having marched an army up the Bolan in 1839 and lost another coming back, garrisoned Quetta permanently in 1877 and made it the base from which Afghanistan was watched for seventy years. The railway through the pass, hacked up the gorge in the 1880s, is one of the steepest main lines ever built in the subcontinent.

• In the same set asKhojak Pass & the Chaman line

  Quetta has two gates and they point opposite ways. The Bolan drops south-east to Sindh and the Indus; the Khojak climbs north-west to Chaman and Kandahar. Holding the valley between them is what the whole British position in Balochistan was for, and both were driven through with railway engineering in the 1880s — the Bolan up the gorge, the Khojak under the mountain in a four-kilometre tunnel. The city in the middle was a cantonment before it was anything else.

• Power passed toKalāt

  Quetta was the Khan of Kalat's, and then it was not. The Ahmadzai Khans held the whole plateau from Kalat as a tribal confederacy from 1666, and Quetta sat inside their territory; under the treaties of 1854 and 1876 the British took Quetta on perpetual lease and turned it into the province's real capital, leaving Kalat its throne and its tribal levies. By 1877 Balochistan was administered from a cantonment in the Khanate's own country, which is the arrangement Baloch nationalism has argued about ever since.

• Site adjacencyZiārat & the Residency

  Ziarat is Quetta's hill station, a hundred kilometres north-east and eight hundred metres higher, and it is where the administration went in summer. What makes it more than that is the forest it stands in — a quarter of a million acres of slow-growing juniper, some of the trees several thousand years old, and one of the largest stands of its kind in the world. Quetta's own valley was stripped of its trees long ago for fuel and construction; the junipers survived because they were too far up to be worth carrying down.

• In the same set asHazara Town, Quetta

  Quetta is the most ethnically layered city in Pakistan and Hazara Town is the clearest instance of why: a Pashtun and Baloch town on the Afghan road, with a Persian-speaking Shia community that arrived from the Hazarajat in the 1890s and kept arriving for the next century, plus Punjabi and Urdu-speaking settlers from the cantonment period. The city's two Hazara quarters, on the west and east sides, have been walled and checkpointed since sectarian killings began in the 1990s.

• Site withinHazara Town, Quetta

  Hazara Town sits within Quetta, Balochistan, Pakistan — the main residential quarter of the Hazara Shia community in the city. The quarter houses most of Quetta's 500,000-strong Hazara population, who had migrated from Bamiyan and central Afghanistan over the 19-20 centuries. The 2013 Hazara Town bombings (10 January 2013 killing 96, 16 February 2013 killing 73-plus) made Hazara Town the site of some of the deadliest sectarian attacks in Pakistani Shia community history.

On these journeys

• Balochistan — the plateau and the Makran coast

Sources

Wikipedia, “Quetta” and “1935 Quetta earthquake”. Geological Survey of Pakistan seismic records; Imperial Gazetteer of India, Baluchistan volume.

• Wikipedia — Quetta
• Wikipedia — 1935 Quetta earthquake