Red Fort

After the British retook Delhi in the autumn of 1857, engineers went into the fort with demolition orders. What came down was not the wall — the wall was useful — but the palace behind it. Marble pavilions, garden courts, service quarters, the buildings where the imperial household had actually lived: most of it was cleared. In their place went rows of barracks, plain and rectangular, for the garrison that would hold the site for the next ninety years.

This is why the fort feels strangely empty today. The lawns you walk across between the surviving pavilions are not a design decision. They are the space where the rest of the palace used to be.

A Capital Moved On Purpose

Shah Jahan built the fort because he decided to move the Mughal capital from Agra to Delhi. He laid out a whole new city on the bank of the Yamuna, named it Shahjahanabad after himself, and put this fort at its heart as palace, treasury and seat of government. Work started in 1639 and finished in 1648. The walls were cut from the local red sandstone, which is where the name comes from, and they enclosed something closer to a small city than a citadel.

Inside were the Diwan-i-Am, the hall where the emperor heard petitions from the public, and the Diwan-i-Khas, the smaller marble hall for ministers and ambassadors, plus baths, a mosque, gardens and pavilions. Threading through nearly all of it was a single water channel called the Nahr-i-Bihisht, the Stream of Paradise.

Water was drawn from the Yamuna, carried in by canal, then run through carved marble troughs from room to room. In a city where summer regularly passes forty degrees this was air conditioning, but it was also a statement: the entire palace had been designed as one continuous garden, and the water proved it by flowing through all of it without interruption.

The Throne That Left

In March 1739 the Persian ruler Nader Shah, fresh from destroying a Mughal army in the field, entered Delhi and eventually walked into the Diwan-i-Khas. Standing there was the Peacock Throne, years of goldsmithing encrusted with gems, the single most expensive object the dynasty owned. He had it dismantled and carried back to Iran along with the rest of the plunder — enough, by most accounts, that he could suspend taxation at home for a few years afterwards.

On the wall of that same hall is a Persian couplet: if there is a paradise on earth, it is this, it is this, it is this. The couplet is still there. The throne was broken up and has never been seen whole again.

There is a story about the main gate too. When Aurangzeb added an outer barbican in front of the Lahori Gate for defence, his imprisoned father is said to have complained that it was like drawing a veil across a beautiful woman's face. The source is shaky, but the barbican is real, and it does hide the gate.

The Panel That Went To London

Behind the marble alcove where the emperor sat in the Diwan-i-Am, there were inlay panels — coloured stones set flush into white marble. One of them shows a figure playing a lyre with animals gathered around him listening. That is Orpheus, out of Greek myth, sitting directly behind a Mughal emperor's head. Historians generally credit a European craftsman working at the court.

In the years after 1857 these panels were prised out and pieces were shipped to England. In the early twentieth century, under Lord Curzon, a number of them were tracked down and reinstalled. Some of the stones you look at now have made the trip to London and back.

Now

Since 1947, every 15 August, the Indian prime minister raises the national flag at the Lahori Gate and speaks from the ramparts. The army held the fort until 2003, when it was handed over to the Archaeological Survey of India. It was listed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2007.

The threat now is unglamorous: Delhi's air. Sandstone is porous, and pollution settles into it and darkens it; the marble yellows. The river has shifted away from the walls it once ran beside, and the canals that fed the palace dried up more than a century ago. The marble channels of the Stream of Paradise are all still there. They are simply dry.