Jaipur is known for being a pink city because of a coat of pink paint covering every building in the older parts of the city. The tradition dates back to about a hundred years ago, when it was the only color which could be obtained in sufficient quantity to paint the entire city.

About fifteen kilometers from Jaipur proper is the Amber fort. Although its name might be derived from its vaguely yellowish color, it actually comes from its Indian name, Amer. Access is up a paved, gated roadway, somewhat shielded from view at the bottom of this picture. We took an elephant ride up, although the elephant seemed not to want to go.


Once you get to the top, you're dropped off at a broad courtyard. Some of the elephants which are lined up in the parking lot are lined up in teh senter of this picture. Also just barely visible is a line of fortifications and watchtowers along the ridgeline of the hills beyond.


Inside, the fort is an immense complex of ramps, courtyards, audience halls, and apartments. Oh, and a few lovely gardens, like this one.


One of the things that struck me as weird about "Persian" carpets is that their designs had been represented as being drawn from the design of gardens. I always thought "That's weird. Gardens don't look like that. Must be heavily stylized." But then I started seeing things like this all over the place.


Probably the most impressive part of the Amber fort was the mirror room. One part near the entrance had its walls heavily encrusted with little chips of highly polished metal. They're fairly blurry mirrors, but the reflect light just fine. But then our tour guide took us into a room, closed the door (no windows, so it was pitch black), and had a guy there light two tiny candles. The guy recited a little verse based on "Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star" as he gracefully waved the candles through the air, and the entire room glittered. Marvelous.

And speaking of marvelous, Jaipur itself hosts perhaps the world's most advanced observatory lacking actual sensing equipment. It was built in the eighteenth century and consists of a variety of vast sundials, astrolabes, and so on. The typical piece of equipment is a sundial (for lack of a better word) like those clustered to the left of the picture below.


The sundials consist of a semicircular swath of marble with a stairway at the base of the curve. The stairway points approximately northerly (although there's a cluster of twelve, each aligned with a specific zodiacal sign). As the sun rises and sets, the shadow of the stairway falls on the semicircle. The passage of the shadow as measured by precise engravings (see below) could be used to measure angles, time of day, and so on with remarkable precision. The tallest of the sundials is ten stories tall, with a resolution of two seconds.