Gardens of Babur

• 1. Introduction

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  Bagh-e Babur, the Gardens of Babur, sits on a hillside in Kabul's District 5, framed by the Sher Darwaza mountain to the east and the quiet nearness of the Kabul Zoo to the northwest. It is one of the oldest surviving garden sites in Afghanistan, thought to have been laid out around 1504. What draws up to one million visitors in a single year to this place? The answer reaches back more than five centuries, to a conqueror who wanted a garden and, eventually, a grave.

• 2. Babur's Garden

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  When Babur took Kabul from the Arghun dynasty in 1504, he ordered the construction of what his own memoirs called an "avenue garden." Those memoirs, the Baburnama, were written in the 16th century and remain one of the most detailed accounts of how the garden was conceived. Babur used the site as a guest house for special occasions, particularly in the summer seasons. Relics found at the site date as far back as the 3rd century BC, and garden management has noted that caravans once passed through the area to exchange trade goods. Wild cherry trees known locally as alubalu were reportedly introduced to the garden by Babur himself, brought from the north of Kabul. The garden was never purely ornamental. It was also intended as a final resting place. It was the tradition of Mughal princes to develop sites for recreation and pleasure, then to choose one of those sites as their burial ground. Babur chose this one.

• 3. Mughal Pilgrimages

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  Jahangir made a pilgrimage to Bagh-e Babur in 1607 and left a practical mark on the site: he ordered walls built around all gardens in Kabul, a prayer platform laid in front of Babur's grave, and an inscribed headstone placed at its head. Those decisions shaped how later visitors would experience the space. The most dramatic physical transformation came in 1638, when the Mughal Emperor Shah Jahan visited. He ordered a marble screen erected around Babur's tomb and a mosque built on the terrace below. Accounts from that same year describe a stone water channel running between an avenue of trees from the terrace below the mosque, with pools placed at intervals along its length. Shah Jahan's additions, while honoring Babur, also changed the character of the place. The scholar Salome Zajadacz-Hastenrath argues that Shah Jahan's work effectively converted the garden into a formal graveyard. The mosque was placed on the thirteenth terrace, the one nearest to Mecca; the fourteenth terrace held Babur's funerary enclosure and the tombs of some of his male relatives. By surrounding Babur's tomb with an enclosure, Shah Jahan physically separated the emperor from those buried nearby. An inscription from the Aga Khan Historic Cities Programme quotes the language used to describe the mosque Shah Jahan built: it called Babur "the light garden of the god forgiven angel king whose rest is in the garden of heaven."

• 4. The Lost Tomb

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  By 1832, a British soldier named Charles Masson recorded the only surviving modern description of Babur's tomb enclosure. His sketch and short account were published in 1842, the same year an earthquake destroyed the tomb. Masson found the enclosure in a deteriorated state but still noted fine workmanship: high walls covered in jali-work and relief carving, surrounded by white marble "curiously and elegantly carved." He also observed that no one was superintending the site and that considerable liberty had been taken with the enclosing stones. That brief record is the closest the modern world can come to seeing what Shah Jahan built. Over the decades that followed the earthquake, the garden underwent a succession of changes driven by Afghan rulers rather than Mughal emperors. By 1880, Amir Abdur Rahman Khan had a pavilion and a residence built for his wife, Bibi Halima. In 1933, the garden was converted into a public recreation space with pools and fountains as the central features. A greenhouse and swimming pool were added in the late 1970s. The enclosure of Babur's tomb was gone, but the garden endured.

• 5. Families of the Dead

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  Babur himself, who ruled from 1494 to 1530 and died in that final year, founded the Mughal Empire and was born in 1483. Several of his relatives were buried in the garden alongside him. Khanzada Begum, his older sister, lived from 1478 to 1545 and had been the wife of Shaybani Khan. Gulbadan Begum, a daughter born in 1523, lived until 1602 and wrote the Humayun-Nama. Hindal Mirza, Babur's youngest son, was born in 1519 and died in 1551. His only child, Ruqaiya Sultan Begum, born in 1542 and died in 1626, is buried next to him. Mirza Muhammad Hakim, Babur's grandson through Humayun, was born in 1553 and died in 1585. The garden also holds Fakhr-un-Nissa, Babur's first-born daughter, who died in infancy in 1501. Shah Abul Maali, Humayun's son-in-law, lived from 1550 to 1564 and came from the family of Sayyids of Termez. Since the 16th of January 2008, the care of these graves has fallen under the independent Bagh-e Babur Trust, supported by Kabul Municipality, the Afghan Ministry of Information and Culture, and the Aga Khan Trust for Culture.

• 6. War Damage and Restoration

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  The Afghan Civil War from 1992 to 1996 left the gardens heavily damaged. A careful survey of the perimeter walls followed, some sections of which are thought to date from the late 19th century and are built from a mix of hand-laid earth known as pakhsa, sun-dried bricks, and stone foundations. Repairs and rebuilding of those walls between 2002 and 2004 generated nearly 100,000 work days for skilled and unskilled labor. Since 2003, conservation work has focused on the white marble mosque built by Aurangzeb in 1675 to mark his conquest of Balkh, the restoration of Babur's grave enclosure, repairs to an early 20th-century garden pavilion, and the reconstruction of Tajbeg Palace. A new caravanserai was built on the footprint of an earlier building at the base of the garden, at the spot where the base of a gateway built by Shah Jahan has been preserved. Several thousand indigenous trees were planted, including planes, cypresses, hawthorn, wild cherry, and other fruit and shade trees. Partial piping of the irrigation system was installed. Thirteen terraces, along with the network of paths and stairs connecting them, were re-established based on archaeological excavations.

• 7. Revival and Identity

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  Architect Zahra Breshna, working with the Department for Preservation and Rehabilitation of Afghanistan's Urban Heritage, has argued that restoration should focus on "developing and strengthening the partially forgotten local and traditional aspects, whilst placing them in a contemporary global context." The goal, in her framing, is to preserve tradition without obstructing the development of a modern social, ecological, and economic institution. Architect Abdul Wasay Najimi has put it more directly: "Restoration of confidence, pride and hope would be the main outcome in reintegrating the historic quarters in the mainstream rehabilitation and development of Kabul." The Aga Khan plan for Bagh-e Babur centers on rebuilding the perimeter walls, rehabilitating the Shah Jahani mosque, and restoring Babur's grave enclosure. Perimeter walls of this kind, common in Islamic cities, serve as enclosures for orchards in a tradition rooted in the region. Nearly 300,000 people visited the site in 2008, the year the Bagh-e Babur Trust took over management. By 2016 that number had grown to roughly 1,030,000. The same trees Babur planted from the north of Kabul now stand again in a garden that once drew Mughal emperors and still draws a million visitors a year.