Place · juniper forest & hill station · Pakistan
Ziārat & the Residency
A hill station above Quetta standing in one of the largest and oldest juniper forests in the world — some quarter of a million acres of Juniperus excelsa polycarpos, with individual trees reckoned at several thousand years and a growth rate of around an inch a decade. The British built a timber Residency here as the summer seat of the Agent to the Governor-General, and Muhammad Ali Jinnah spent most of his last months in it in 1948, being treated for tuberculosis before he was flown to Karachi to die.
- Function
- Landscape & environmental change
- Confidence
- Established / referenced
- Location
- 30.381, 67.729
Worth knowing
The junipers grow so slowly that a trunk a metre thick may be four thousand years old, which makes the forest older than anything built in the subcontinent and effectively impossible to replace once cut.
Connections (2)
- Site adjacencyQuetta
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.
- Life routeMuhammad Ali Jinnah
Jinnah spent most of the summer of 1948 at the Residency in Ziarat, being treated for the tuberculosis and lung cancer that had been concealed throughout the years of the Pakistan campaign. He was flown to Karachi on 11 September and died that evening. The concealment matters historically: had his condition been known in 1946 or 1947, the Muslim League's negotiating position rested on a leader whose life expectancy was already measured in months, and several arguments about the pace of Partition turn on it.
On these journeys
Sources
Wikipedia, “Quaid-e-Azam Residency” and “Ziarat”. IUCN Pakistan juniper forest assessments; Stanley Wolpert, Jinnah of Pakistan, on the Ziarat months.
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