Jaipur City: Why the Pink City Is a UNESCO World Heritage Site

Jaipur, the capital of Rajasthan, was one of the first planned cities of modern India. Laid out in 1727 on a grid of wide straight streets, it remains a busy centre of trade and craft. UNESCO inscribed the walled city as a World Heritage Site in 2019.

At a glance

• Location: Jaipur, Rajasthan
• Inscribed: 2019
• Type: Cultural
• Founded: 1727
• Founded by: Maharaja Sawai Jai Singh II

The plan

Sawai Jai Singh, ruler of the hill fortress of Amber, decided to build a new capital on the plain to the south. He was a mathematician and astronomer, and his city reflected it. With his planner, the Bengali scholar Vidyadhar Bhattacharya, he laid out a grid of nine squares, following the traditional Indian treatises on town planning while also drawing on Mughal and Western ideas.

• Main streets: very wide and straight, meeting at large public squares called chaupars
• Bazaars: lines of uniform shops with covered arcades along the main streets, each market assigned to a trade
• The centre: the palace quarter, occupying two of the nine squares
• Walls: with seven gates

Why pink

The buildings were originally of varied colours. In 1876 Maharaja Ram Singh II had the city painted a uniform terracotta pink, the colour of welcome, for the visit of the Prince of Wales. The colour has been kept ever since by regulation.

What to see

• City Palace: still partly the home of the former royal family, with museums of textiles and arms
• Hawa Mahal: the Palace of the Winds, built in 1799, a five-storeyed screen of 953 small windows from which the women of the court could watch the street
• Jantar Mantar: the royal observatory, a World Heritage Site in its own right
• Govind Dev Temple
• Johari Bazaar and Bapu Bazaar: for jewellery, textiles and crafts

Crafts

The founder invited merchants and craftsmen to settle, and the city is still known for gem cutting, enamelled jewellery, block-printed cloth, blue pottery and marble carving.

Why it is a World Heritage Site

Jaipur is an outstanding example of an eighteenth-century planned city in which ancient Hindu, Mughal and contemporary Western ideas were brought together, and which was designed from the start as a commercial capital.

Visiting

Jaipur is about 280 kilometres from Delhi. Amber Fort, one of the Hill Forts of Rajasthan, is eleven kilometres from the centre.

Image: The Hawa Mahal, the Palace of the Winds, in Jaipur. Photo by Chainwit., licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.