Jaipur is pure Rajasthan: the land of maharajas, colourful turbans, imposing moustaches, saris bursting with fuchsia pink and yellow, fairy-tale palaces and forts crowning every hill. Capital of India's most picturesque state and the third point of the Golden Triangle, the 'Pink City' is the gateway to a legendary world, that of the Rajput warriors who held out for centuries and built some of the most spectacular fortresses and palaces on the subcontinent. After the intensity of Delhi and the wonder of the Taj Mahal in Agra, Jaipur offers colour, craftsmanship and a regal elegance that wins you over.
What's amazing about Jaipur is that it isn't a chaotic ancient city that grew without a plan, but one of India's first planned cities: it was founded in 1727 by the astronomer maharaja Jai Singh II, who laid it out following the principles of Hindu architecture, with a perfect grid of wide streets, bazaars organised by guild and a wall with monumental gates. At its heart beats the City Palace, still the residence of the royal family; next to it is the Jantar Mantar, an extraordinary astronomical observatory of giant stone instruments; and overlooking the street stands the Hawa Mahal, the 'Palace of the Winds', with its pink façade of hundreds of little latticed windows. On the surrounding hills, the great forts keep watch: Amber, Nahargarh, Jaigarh.
This guide helps you make the most of Jaipur wisely: which forts and palaces are unmissable, how much admission costs and whether the combined ticket is worth it, how to get up to Amber Fort, where to eat tasty Rajasthani food, how to buy crafts without falling for scams and how to fit the city into a northern India itinerary. Jaipur rewards the traveller who gets lost in its bazaars, climbs up to a fort at sunset and lets themselves be seduced by the sparkle of a Rajasthan that still tastes of royalty.
Jaipur was founded in 1727 by Maharaja Sawai Jai Singh II, Rajput ruler of the kingdom of Amber and a man of exceptional curiosity, passionate about astronomy and mathematics. Faced with a growing population and a shortage of water in the old capital of Amber, up in the hills, Jai Singh decided to build a new city on the plain and designed it, with the help of the Bengali scholar Vidyadhar Bhattacharya, according to the principles of Vastu Shastra (traditional Hindu architecture): a perfect grid of wide streets divided into sectors, with orderly bazaars, temples and palaces, something unheard of in the India of his time. He built the City Palace and the Jantar Mantar observatory and laid the foundations of a prosperous city. His successors added gems such as the Hawa Mahal (1799). The maharajas of Jaipur, like many Rajput princes, made alliances with the Mughal Empire and later with the British, keeping a degree of autonomy. In 1876, to welcome the Prince of Wales (the future Edward VII), the city was painted pink —the colour of hospitality— and the nickname 'Pink City' stuck for good. After India's independence in 1947 and the integration of the princely states, Jaipur became the capital of the new state of Rajasthan. Today its old town is a World Heritage Site. The full story of the Rajputs, of Amber and of Jai Singh is on our history page.
Read the full history ↓The historic heart of power in India: Delhi, capital of sultans, Mughals and the Raj; Agra and its Taj Mahal; and Jaipur, the pink city that completes the classic Golden Triangle.
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Origins, formation and what the sources say.
To understand Jaipur you have to start with the Rajputs, the Hindu warrior clans that for centuries ruled the region now known as Rajasthan ('the land of kings'). Proud of their lineage and their code of honour, the Rajputs built impregnable fortresses in the hills and fought countless battles, both among themselves and against invaders from the northwest. One of those clans, the Kachwaha, ruled the kingdom of Amber (or Amer) from the 12th century, with its capital at the fortress-palace of the same name, perched in the Aravalli hills on the outskirts of present-day Jaipur.
Unlike other Rajput kingdoms that held out to the end, the Kachwaha of Amber chose a strategic alliance with the powerful Mughal Empire. From the 16th century onwards, their maharajas served as trusted generals to the Mughal emperors and sealed the alliance through marriage: a princess of Amber was the mother of Emperor Jahangir. That shrewd policy earned them wealth, titles and considerable autonomy, while many other kingdoms were subdued by force. Man Singh I, one of Akbar's great generals, expanded the splendid Amber Fort we admire today.
For generations, the kingdom of Amber prospered under this relationship with the Mughals, building up power and cultural refinement. But by the early 18th century, the old hilltop capital was starting to feel cramped and was running short of water for a growing population. A new city was needed, and along came a ruler with the vision and the knowledge to build it from scratch.
The founder of Jaipur was Maharaja Sawai Jai Singh II (1688-1743), one of the most extraordinary figures of 18th-century India: a Rajput ruler who was at once a warrior, a diplomat and, above all, a passionate scholar of astronomy, mathematics and architecture. Faced with the water and space problems of the old capital at Amber, and keen to create a modern capital worthy of his power, in 1727 he decided to build an entirely new city on the plain, a few kilometres south of the fort.
Jai Singh left nothing to chance. With the help of a brilliant Bengali scholar, Vidyadhar Bhattacharya, he designed Jaipur according to the principles of Vastu Shastra and Shilpa Shastra, the Hindu treatises on architecture and town planning. The result was something unheard of in the India of his day: a city laid out on a perfect rectangular grid, divided into nine large sectors (chowkris) that echoed Hindu cosmology, with wide, straight avenues crossing at right angles, bazaars organised by guild, water systems, and the whole thing enclosed by a wall with seven monumental gates. At the centre he built the City Palace, his residence, and next to it the Jantar Mantar, the great astronomical observatory of giant stone instruments that reflects his passion for science.
Fascinated by astronomy, Jai Singh had five of these observatories built in different cities across northern India, correcting astronomical tables and measuring time with astonishing precision. Jaipur was thus born as a city-work of art, planned with mathematical and spiritual rigour, one of the first modern cities on the subcontinent. Centuries later, its historic centre would be recognised by Unesco as a World Heritage Site.
After the death of Jai Singh II in 1743, the kingdom went through periods of instability and succession struggles, but the city kept growing and becoming more beautiful. In 1799, Maharaja Sawai Pratap Singh commissioned one of Jaipur's best-loved gems: the Hawa Mahal, the 'Palace of the Winds', with its façade of hundreds of small latticed windows through which the women of the court, secluded according to the custom of purdah, could watch street life without being seen.
Meanwhile, Mughal power was crumbling and a new force was taking hold in India: the British. In the early 19th century, the kingdom of Jaipur, like most Rajput principalities, signed a treaty with the British East India Company that turned it into a 'princely state': it kept its maharaja and its internal autonomy in exchange for recognising British sovereignty in military and foreign affairs. This status allowed the dynasty and its lavish lifestyle to survive throughout the Raj.
The episode that gave Jaipur its most famous nickname took place in 1876. For the visit of the Prince of Wales, Albert Edward (the future King Edward VII), Maharaja Sawai Ram Singh II ordered the whole old city to be painted a terracotta pink, the traditional colour of hospitality and welcome in Rajput culture. The city looked so beautiful in that colour that the custom stuck and, by law, the buildings of the historic centre are still painted pink to this day. And so 'the Pink City' was born, one of the most famous nicknames in world tourism.
The 20th century brought the big change. When India gained independence from the United Kingdom in 1947, there were more than five hundred princely states like Jaipur on the subcontinent, ruled by maharajas and nawabs under British sovereignty. The new Indian government, driven firmly by minister Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel and his aide V. P. Menon, took on the titanic task of persuading — or pressuring — all those princes to merge their kingdoms into the new Indian Union.
The maharaja of Jaipur at the time, Sawai Man Singh II, agreed to integration. Between 1948 and 1949, Jaipur joined neighbouring Rajput princely states (Jodhpur, Udaipur, Bikaner, Jaisalmer and many more) to form a new state within India, and in 1949 the city of Jaipur was chosen as the capital of what would eventually be called Rajasthan ('the land of kings'), the large state in the northwest. Man Singh II was initially appointed governor (rajpramukh) of the new state, in a transition that sought to give the former rulers a symbolic role.
Over the years, however, the maharajas' privileges were whittled away: in 1971, a constitutional reform abolished the official titles and the allowances (privy purses) that the Indian state paid to the former royal families. Many maharajas, including those of Jaipur, then turned their palaces and forts into luxury hotels and museums, a formula that preserved the heritage and fuelled tourism. Figures such as Maharani Gayatri Devi of Jaipur, famous for her beauty and her activism, threw themselves into politics and public life. The monarchy no longer ruled, but its splendour became the city's greatest attraction.
21st-century Jaipur is a vibrant city of more than three million people, the political and economic capital of Rajasthan and one of the most popular tourist destinations in India. In 2019, its walled historic centre — that planned city of grid streets, guild bazaars and pink buildings that Jai Singh dreamed up almost three centuries ago — was inscribed by Unesco on the World Heritage List, in recognition of its value as an exceptional example of early modern town planning. Several of its forts (Amber among them) were already part of the 'Hill Forts of Rajasthan' World Heritage Site.
With that very Indian ease, the city blends tradition and modernity: alongside palaces turned luxury hotels and centuries-old bazaars, modern neighbourhoods, universities, a tech industry and a thriving cultural scene are growing. The Jaipur Literature Festival, held every January, has become one of the biggest literary festivals in the world, drawing writers and readers from across the globe. Jaipur also remains a leading world centre for gem and precious-stone cutting, jewellery and textile crafts (block printing, blue pottery).
For travellers, Jaipur is the golden gateway to Rajasthan and the perfect finale to the Golden Triangle: a city where you can still breathe the air of the maharajas, where every hill has its fort, every street its bazaar and every sunset a pink postcard. Behind the glitter there are also, as everywhere in India, contrasts and inequalities; but few cities manage to convey so powerfully the romance, colour and elegance of a world — that of the Rajput kings — which, though it no longer rules, lives on in every stone of the Pink City.
