Jaipur - City Palace & Jantar Mantar

Wednesday, 17 September 2014

In the afternoon we toured the city of Jaipur, the "Pink City". Just as the Amer (Amber) Fort was painted in a yellow color, most of the buildings in Jaipur have been painted a distinctive orange-pink color.

City Palace

The main audience pavilion in the City Palace.

In the main entrance courtyard.

The main women's courtyard had four elaborately decorated doorways. Each one was slightly different.

Peacock detail from one of the doors.

The Hawa Mahal ("Wind Palace") is a pavilion near the City Palace that provided a location for women to view the goings-on in the street below. It is essentially just a facade -- a scant one-room thick wall.

Jantar Mantar

Next to the City Palace is the Jantar Mantar observatory. The name means "calculation instrument". Jai Singh, king and astronomer, designed and built five of these in north-central India to keep track of all important astronomical observations.

The small sundial.

With this sundial, you can read the time to the nearest 15 sec. The numeral near the center of the image is a Sanskrit/Hindi 4. So the local time was about 3:55:45.

The large sundial. In theory, it can be read to the nearest second, but the width of the sun's shadow becomes an issue at this resolution -- as does the lack of total perfection in construction and wear over the years.

There are a total of fourteen instruments at this site. They can be used to predict a number of astronomical events such as eclipses, solstices, equinoxes, as well as tracking planets and stars.