Place · valley capital & route hub · India

Srinagar

Also known as Srinagar — the Kashmir route

Function

Travel & migration

Confidence

Established / referenced

Location

34.080, 74.800

Worth knowing

Kumarajiva studied here, Kashmiri monks translated in China, and the fourth Buddhist council is traditionally placed in Kashmir under Kanishka. Rinchen Zangpo took Kashmiri artists to western Tibet in the eleventh century, which is why the Alchi paintings look the way they do.

Connections (22)

• TransmissionGilgit

  The Gilgit manuscripts are in Buddhist Sanskrit of a kind associated with Kashmir, and the route from the Kashmir valley over the Zoji La and down to Gilgit is how texts and teachers moved north into the mountains and on to Central Asia and Tibet. Kashmir was the doctrinal source for Khotan and later for western Tibet; Rinchen Zangpo brought Kashmiri painters back over these passes in the eleventh century, and their work is on the walls at Alchi.

• Trade routeLeh

  Pashmina wool from the western Tibetan plateau came through Leh and over the Zoji La to Srinagar, where it was spun and woven into the shawls that made Kashmir's name in Europe. Control of that one commodity chain is why the Dogras took Ladakh in 1834 and why the trade treaties of the nineteenth century concentrate on it. When the Xinjiang and Tibet routes closed in 1949 and 1959 the Leh bazaar lost the whole of its business within a decade.

• Teaching lineageShāradā Peeth

  Kashmir's Sanskrit scholarship — Abhinavagupta's aesthetics and Shaiva philosophy, Kalhana's Rajatarangini, the Sharada script — made the valley the north's intellectual centre for several centuries, and Sharada Peeth in the Neelum valley was its library and its shrine. The script is named for the goddess of that temple. Kashmiri manuscripts, monks and painters went out over these passes to Tibet, Central Asia and the plains.

• Trade routeNubra & the Karakoram Pass

  Pashmina from the western Tibetan plateau came down through Leh and over the Zoji La to Srinagar, where it was spun and woven into the shawls that made Kashmir's name in Europe and drove a European imitation industry at Paisley. Control of that one commodity chain is why the Dogras took Ladakh in 1834 and why the nineteenth-century trade treaties of the region are almost entirely about wool.

• Teaching lineageKhotan

  Khotan's own chronicles claim foundation by a son of Ashoka and its early administrative language was a Prakrit written in Kharosthi; its Buddhism came from Kashmir and Gandhara over the Karakoram rather than from China. Khotanese Saka, an Iranian language, was written in Brahmi. An oasis kingdom on the edge of the Gobi ran its offices in an Indian language and its religion on Kashmiri doctrine for several centuries.

• Site withinHazratbal Shrine, Srinagar

  The Hazratbal Shrine sits on the northern shore of the Dal Lake in Srinagar and holds the Moi-e-Muqaddas, a hair of the Prophet Muhammad brought from the Hijaz in the seventeenth century and installed in the present marble building after a 1963 crisis in which the relic briefly went missing. Hazratbal is the most important Muslim shrine of Kashmir and its Friday prayers are a Srinagar political event in their own right.

• Site withinShah-e-Hamadan, Srinagar

  The Shah-e-Hamadan shrine stands on the right bank of the Jhelum in old Srinagar — a timber khanqah of the fourteenth century for the Suhrawardi mystic Mir Sayyid Ali Hamadani, who travelled from Iran in 1372 and shaped Kashmir's conversion to Islam more decisively than any single figure. The present Kashmiri wooden shrine is one of the oldest surviving timber mosques in the valley and has been rebuilt after fires several times without changing its form.

• Site withinMakhdoom Sahib, Srinagar

  The Makhdoom Sahib shrine sits on the southern slope of Hari Parbat hill in Srinagar, holding the tomb of the sixteenth-century Suhrawardi Sufi Sheikh Hamza Makhdoom. The shrine is set within the Mughal wall of Nagar Nagar that Akbar threw around the hill in 1590 and is one of the three Sufi anchors — with Hazratbal and Shah-e-Hamadan — of Srinagar's inner city Islam.

• Site withinShankaracharya hill, Srinagar

  The Shankaracharya hill stands at the southeastern edge of Srinagar above Dal Lake, with its stone temple on a circular plinth at the summit. Kalhana's twelfth-century Rajatarangini calls the hill Jyeshtheshwara and attaches a Shaiva lineage to it that long predates its later association with Adi Shankara, so the shrine is one of the oldest surviving monuments in the Srinagar landscape.

• Site withinJamia Masjid, Srinagar

  The Jamia Masjid of Srinagar is the city's great congregational mosque, founded by Sultan Sikandar in 1394 and rebuilt after fires three times — a Kashmiri timber building of three hundred and seventy deodar columns around a central courtyard rather than a masonry one. It stands in the Nowhatta quarter inside the Nagar Nagar wall and its Friday prayers have been a Srinagar political event for six centuries.

• Site withinHarwan

  Harwan sits six kilometres northeast of Srinagar on a terraced slope above the Dal, with the remains of a Buddhist complex whose stamped terracotta tiles are the only evidence of Kashmir's eastern Buddhist architectural idiom. It is traditionally identified with the fourth Buddhist council site under Kanishka, which would make it one of the most important Kashmiri Buddhist sites, though the identification is contested.

• Site withinMughal Gardens of Kashmir

  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.

• Site withinKani shawl weaving and pashmina

  Kani shawl weaving and pashmina processing are the Srinagar crafts — the pashm wool is combed from Changthangi goats in Ladakh and carried down the Zoji La to Srinagar's spinning and weaving workshops, where the twill-tapestry shawl is woven on kani looms by families whose chain of practice runs back to the Mughal workshops. The talim pattern-chart system is a Srinagar invention, and the Paisley name itself is a Scottish mimicry of a Srinagar motif.

• Site withinSrinagar papier-mâché and khatamband

  Papier-mâché and khatamband woodwork are the two Srinagar interior crafts — kar-i-qalamdani painted lacquer-work and the pyramidal interlocking cedarwood ceiling panels that line most of the old-city mosques. Both techniques came in with the fourteenth-century Persianate migration into Kashmir and are now almost entirely practised in a few lanes of downtown Srinagar.

• Site withinDal Lake, Srinagar

  Dal Lake is the central landscape fact of Srinagar — eighteen square kilometres of water inside the city, with houseboats on its western edge and the Mughal gardens on its eastern. Every ruler of Kashmir from the Sultanate onward has marked the lake, and the city's old quarters, its summer palaces, its new airport and the ongoing shoreline conservation debates all reference it. Srinagar is unimaginable without the lake and the lake has no meaning outside Srinagar.

• Site withinPari Mahal, Srinagar

  Pari Mahal is the hilltop Sufi school and terraced garden Dara Shikoh built in 1650 above Chashme Shahi on the Zabarwan range at Srinagar's southeastern edge. From its top terrace the whole Dal Lake, the old city and the Hari Parbat fort read as one frame — the garden was chosen as a view-point over the city as much as a school within it.

• Site withinHari Parbat Fort, Srinagar

  Hari Parbat is Srinagar's northern hill, with the Mughal fort of Akbar inside its outer wall and the Nagar Nagar plan that Akbar intended to build around it but never completed. The hill carries the Sharika Devi temple of the Kashmiri Pandits, the Makhdoom Sahib Sufi shrine and a Sikh gurdwara on separate faces of the one rock, so Srinagar's three traditions share this landmark more completely than any other in the city.

• Site withinBurzahom

  Burzahom lies within Srinagar — the two sites sit about 15 km apart, well inside the city's historical boundary and part of the same urban or peri-urban landscape. Burzahom is one of the specific sites that give Srinagar 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.

• Site withinJammu and Kashmir (princely state)

  Jammu and Kashmir (princely state) lies within Srinagar — the two sites sit about 0 km apart, well inside the city's historical boundary and part of the same urban or peri-urban landscape. Jammu and Kashmir (princely state) is one of the specific sites that give Srinagar 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.

• Site withinParihaspora

  Parihaspora lies within Srinagar — the two sites sit about 15 km apart, well inside the city's historical boundary and part of the same urban or peri-urban landscape. Parihaspora is one of the specific sites that give Srinagar 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.

• Site withinPandrethan

  Pandrethan lies within Srinagar — the two sites sit about 10 km apart, well inside the city's historical boundary and part of the same urban or peri-urban landscape. Pandrethan is one of the specific sites that give Srinagar 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.

• Route adjacencyZoji La

  Zoji La is Srinagar's one historical overland link to Ladakh — the pass through which the Kashmir valley has connected to Leh for a thousand years, and the route Xuanzang used descending from Kashmir in the seventh century. The Srinagar-Leh road climbs through it from Sonamarg to Dras, and the valley's winter isolation when the pass closes defined Kashmiri trade with Ladakh until the twentieth-century roads. The 1948 Zoji La tank operation to retake Kargil ran from Srinagar.

On these journeys

• The Silk Road — Antioch to Chang’an, through India

Sources

Wikipedia, “Srinagar”. Aurel Stein’s reports; Susan Whitfield, Life Along the Silk Road; the International Dunhuang Project.

• Wikipedia — Srinagar