The capital of Punjab is Pakistan's cultural, educational and artistic centre and easily the most visited city in the country. With its refuge of shady parks and gardens, its clash of Moghul and colonial architecture, and the exotic thrill of its congested streets and bazaars, it's not hard to see why.

A collection of some of the city's attractions include: The Mall, an area of parks and buildings with a decidedly British bent; Lahore Museum, the best and biggest museum in the country; Kim's Gun, the cannon immortalised in Kipling's classic Kim; Aitchison College, an achingly beautiful public school that boasts Imran Khan as a former pupil; Lahore Fort, filled with stately palaces, halls and gardens; and the Old City, where a procession of rickshaws, pony carts, hawkers and veiled women fill the narrow lanes. The city has too many tombs, mosques and mausoleums too mention.

History

With a population of more than 2.5 million, Lahore is Pakistan's second largest city. It occupies a choice site in the midst of fertile alluvial plains. Ptolemy's "Geographia", written about AD I50, refers to it as "Labokla" and locates it with reference to the Indus, the Ravi, the Jhelum and the Chenab rivers.

The city next crops up in literature in connection with the campaigns of the Turkish dynast Mahmud of Ghazni against the Rajas of Lahore between I00I and I008. Around this time it established itself as the capital of the Punjab and thereafter began to play an important and growing role as a centre of Muslim power and influence in the subcontinent. Its heyday was the Mughal era from the early sixteenth century onwards and, as Mughal power began to decline in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Lahore suffered a concomitant period of ignominy and political eclipse. It was here, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, that the Sikh ruler Ranjit Singh declared himself Maharajah of the Punjab and allowed his troops to desecrate many of the city's beautiful Islamic shrines- including the Badshahi Mosque which was, for a while, converted into a powder magazine. By the time British occupied Lahore in I849, one writer moved to describe the city as 'a mere expanse of crumbling ruins'

Happily, this was an exaggeration and today the great buildings laid down by the long-vanished Mughal emperors may be seen in much of their original splendour. All the adverse influences since then seem to have been washed away, like sediment carried off by a flood, leaving behind the fundamental character and beauty of this old Islamic settlement. Fittingly, it was here in I940 that the Muslim League made its first formal demand for the establishment of a Muslim homeland. A towering and graceful monument, the Minar-e-Pakistan (shown above. Please click on the picture for a more detailed view) now stands on the site of the passing of the Pakistan Resolution.

Nearby, the massively fortified walls of Lahore Fort speak eloquently of the centuries of passing history that they have witnessed. The fort antedates the coming of Mahmud of Ghazni in the eleventh century, was ruined by the Mangols in I241, rebuilt in I267, destroyed again by Timurlane in I398 and rebuilt once more in I421. The great Mughal emperor Akbar replaced its mud walls with solid brick masonry in I566 and extended it northwards. Later Jehangir, Shah Jehan and Aurangzeb all added the stamps of their widely differing personalities to its fortification, gateways and palaces.

The fort encloses an area of approximately thirty acres and it is possible to spend many hours wandering there, lost in contemplation of times gone by, trying to reconstruct in your imagination a way of life that the world will never see again. The buildings within its walls are a testament to the gracious style of Mughal rule at its height, in which every man knew his place and courtly behaviour had been refined into an elaborately startified social code. Much of the architecture reflects this code. From a raised balcony in the Diwan-e-Aam, or Hall of Public Audience, built by Shah Jehan in I63I, the emperors looked down on the common people over whom they ruled when they came to present petitions and to request the settlement of disputes. Wealthier citizens and the nobility were allowed to meet their emperors on a level floor in the Diwan-e-Khas, the Hall of Special Audience-which was also built by Shah Jehan, in I633.

While the Hall of Audience are characterized by their strict functionality, other buildings raised under Shah Jehan's patronage are styled in a more imaginative and fanciful mood. Of these the Shish Mahal, or Palace of Mirrors, which stands on the fort's north side, is by far the most splendid. It consists of a row of high domed rooms, the roofs of which are decked out with hundreds of thousands of tiny mirrors in the fashion of the traditional Punjabi craft of "Shishgari" (designs made from mirror fragments). A fire-brand lit inside any part of the Palace of Mirrors throw back a million reflections that dizzy the eye and seem like a galaxy of far-off stars turning in an ink-blue firmament.

Another magnificent remnant of the Mughal era, also partially vandalized in the late eighteenth century by the invading Sikhs, is the Shalimar Garden which stands on the Grand Trunk Road about eight kilometers to the east of the old part of Lahore. "Shalimar" means 'House of Joy' and, in truth, the passing centuries have done nothing to detract from the indefinable atmosphere of light-heartedness and laughter that characterizes this green and peaceful walled retreat. A canal runs the entire 2,006 foot (6II meters) length of the garden and from it 450 sparkling fountains throw up a skein of fresh water that cools and refreshes the atmosphere, making this a favourite place for afternoon walks for the citizens of modern Lahore.

Lahore is rightly regarded as the cultural, architectural and artistic center of Pakistan; indeed, the city is so steeped in historical distinction that it would be possible to spend a lifetime studying it without learning everything that there is to learn.