The Pink City of Jaipur
We spent a day in Jaipur, known as the Pink City due to the near uniformity of building coloring inside the walls of its "old town." The city is the state capital of modern Rajasthan and was the seat of one of Rajasthan's 22 predecessor principalities back in the day. Pink is a bit of a stretch - it's more of an orange-salmon color - but the uniformity is striking.
Observatory (Jantar Mantar)
Maharaja Jai Singh II, one of the rulers of Jaipur, was known as the Newton of the East. He created one of the world's finest observatories, built in 1726 of masonry, marble and brass. The large outdoor area is complete with various large-scale sundials, amazingly accurate to two seconds, and other zodiac and astronomical instruments, most of which are still working today.
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City Palace
While the royal family is no longer a body of power in Jaipur, it still exists for purposes of tradition. The family continues to live in the city palace, built in 1727 by Maharaja Jai Singh II. The palace has a similar feel and layout as the Forbidden City in Beijing, with a series of symmetrical courtyards, pillared outdoor meeting areas, gateways, and surrounding apartments, although on a much smaller scale and in pink and yellow instead of red and gold. It is now mostly a museum with galleries of art, silk and robes, carpets and manuscripts and weapons.
Palace of Winds (Hawa Mahal)
The Palace of Winds, one of India's most recognizable monuments, is actually not a palace at all, but rather a façade so that women of the Royal court could watch the activity on the main street below in the outdoors without being seen. It was built in 1799, using pink sandstone, by Maharaja Pratap Singh. You can see the lattice work that allowed the women to see out while no one was able to see in.
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