The Roads
Beyond Lahore


By following one transect across the city of Lahore, the imperial corridor from Sheikhupura to Shalamar, we gained a perspective on Mughal garden design and the manifold questions it raises.

The roads beyond Lahore can broaden that perspective, and indicate how other garden centers were shaped by and influenced Lahore (see also Lahore and Its Garden Suburbs).  In addition to the gardens below, we trace two main roads beyond Lahore: The Grand Trunk Road from Lahore to Peshawar, and second the The Ancient Southern Road from Lahore to Multan.
Zebunnisa’s Tomb-Garden
 


• Sites in Southern Lahore

For example, our exploration of the gardens in and around Lahore has not yet taken us south along the road toward Multan, past the gardens of Anarkali (1615), Chauburji (1646), and Zebunnisa (mid–seventeenth century).  All of these suburban gardens are subject to enormous development pressures and competing archaeological interpretations that call out for further research and conservation.  Further south, the road follows the Ravi River, past the ancient Indus Valley settlements of Harappa, to the medieval urban center of Multan.
Anarkali’s Tomb-Garden
 

• Sites in Eastern Lahore

Nor have we yet traveled down what is known today as the Mall Road, the principal commercial strip in Lahore, which introduces us to the magnificent gardens of the Mughal governor Wazir Khan and the vast Mughal brickworks which the British converted into horticultural gardens, public parks, and roundabout gardens in the nineteenth century. Nor have we followed the diverse side roads to the east of Lahore, such as Ghore Shah Road, named after a Sufi saint who loved horses and whose grave receives hundreds of clay horses each Thursday evening to this day. Early nineteenth-century maps depict this road as lined with private residential gardens.
Shrine of Ghore Shah
 
Mughal Bridge on the Old Grand Trunk Road

• Sites to the Northwest

Finally, traveling west from Shahdara and the Hiran Minar, the old alignment of the Grand Trunk Road crosses ruined masonry bridges of the Mughal era, passes through small towns that featured their own small yet often elegant garden complexes, and leads to the famous Wah Garden near the Buddhist center of Taxila. Beyond Wah, the road heads to the cities of Peshawar and ultimately Kabul, which had important Mughal gardens.
Mughal Bridge on the Old Grand Trunk Road
 

The following Web pages follow two of these roads, first The Grand Trunk Road from Lahore to Peshawar, and second the The Ancient Southern Road from Lahore to Multan.