Pul Shah Daula, A Two-story bridge that Constructed 400 years ago. (2019)

 Saturday, 09 November 2019 (Date of Visit)

(All pictures and the writeup is author integral property, please respect copyright)

 Pul Shah Daula, A Two-story bridge that Constructed 400 years ago. 

 

View of Bridge from the downstream west side

Tapiala Dost Muhammad Khan is a small town located 11.7 km on Muridka-Narang Mandi Road. The old route of Grand Trunk Road passes through this town. Remains of the old Grand Trunk road still can be seen outside of this village. Also, GT Road from Tapiala (mausoleum) made the onward journey to Pul Shah Daula with an ancient arched bridge on Nullah Degh. 

 

Dr. Saifur Rehman Dar is a famous historian and has done a detailed survey on GTR and caravanserais built along this road. According to him, the Pul shah Daula was most likely constructed in the times of Mughal Emperor Shah Jahan. So, the bridge is roughly 400 years old.

 

However, no reference in any history books could be found, that why the name of this bridge attributed to a famous saint Shah Daula, who buried in Gujrat. 

 

I visited the site of the bridge in 2019. It is a tall bridge spanning over five arches and still operational for every type of traffic. The most fascinating thing about this bridge is that it has two stories. The piers supporting the top deck slab are rising from another deck slab which lies roughly at one foot above the current water level in the stream.  Both Deck Slabs have a 20 ft difference in height.

Another View

 

The bridge was constructed in two phases. After the completion of the first phase of construction, the Degh Nullah (which have a source from Jammu) have seen some high floods, and the bridge got completely drowned under the water. 

 

Shah Jahan expanded the Mughal Empire to the west beyond the Khyber Pass to Ghazna and Kandahar. For timely supplies and communication of military troops, Grand trunk road played an important role in the past.  Pul Shah Daula was one of the major bridges on Grand trunk road. The news of it getting drowned must have been created a panic in Shah Jehan court. The architect assigned to design the bridge screwed for considering the wrong values of flood levels. Mughals who have all the resources and builders at that time to construct a new bridge. It seems the orders of construction of the new bridge on the existing bridge deck have come in quite a haste.  

One last Burj is standing on one end of the parapet wall. The overall stability condition of this bridge does not seem to be good.  Complete neglect has been observed by the concerned Government department to conserve such a great architecture of the past.

The last Standing Burj on Bridge

Burj, cracks can be seen below, could be collapse at any time 

Standing on deck slab of Bridge

Degh Nullah downstream in background

Another view of the Bridge from the upstream side 

Another view of the Bridge from the upstream side 

Another view of the Bridge from the upstream side 

Portions of Grand Trunk Road present before the Bridge of Shah Daula

Remain of Grand Trunk Road

Remains of Grand Trunk Road

Remains of Grand Trunk Road

Remains of Grand Trunk Road

Remains of Grand Trunk Road

Remains of Grand Trunk Road

A Ten year Wait to Visit an Akbar era Tomb in Sarai Mughal (2018)

Date of  visit 04-03-2018
All pictures are owned
Tomb in Sarai Mughal

Sir SALMAN RASHID is my favorite travel writer from Pakistan. In the mid-90s, there was a TV show that used to be telecast on PTV “Travelling along the Alexander trail” that was hosted by Sir Salman Rashid. That, TV show not only inspired me but also become a reason for growing wish inside my soul that sometime in my life; I will do some similar exploring work. 

More than ten years back, I read one of his articles that was about a tomb whose history and name is totally unknown to historians. Sir Salman mentioned some general guidelines about the location of this tomb; it is somewhat 5 km from the head of Baloki on the outskirts of Sarai Mughal. I could not find the exact location of this site on Google earth; however, I put a location pin on the map that maybe I would be able to visit in the future.

My plans to visit Sarai Mughal could never get finalized due to a lack of information about the place. Also, I could not able to find any post or picture related to this tomb on the internet

Well in 2018 after a lap of ten years; I left for Sarai Mughal in search of an unnamed tomb. To my good luck, I found the tomb after some effort.

An eighteen feet high, square tomb stands at the outskirts of the village graveyard. The site is roughly five kilometers to river Ravi. There is no grave inside the tomb. Salman Rashid during his visit to the place had concluded that this (most likely) Akbar-era tomb of the 16th-century era was pre-built but no one got the honor/chance of getting interred here.  A little outside the village, by a government school, and surrounded by a graveyard there stood the lofty building with its squat dome. Other than the lime plaster eroded from the plinth and in patches from one side, the building was in good fettle. In fact, if the plaster on the dome had not been blackened by age, I could have said it had been laid only a few years earlier. In my layman’s estimation the building dates to the last quarter of the 16th century, that is, the final years of the reign of Akbar the Great. The interior of the square building had a bare floor: there was no burial. But the walls were ornate with Mughal-style frescoes. Faded, discolored, and chipped, they had also been marred by cow dung patties.

Wazir Khan's Baradari

18-08-2018

Wazir Khan's Baradari is one of the finest and largest of the genre, and is in well preserved state. It is perched between the Punjab Public Library (PPL), National College of Arts (NCA) and the Lahore Museum and is approached from the Punjab Public Library Road. It has been put to good use as a reading room for the adjoining library and is therefore considered a part of the library.

The building is named after its founder Hakim Ilmuddin titled Wazir Khan, the same grandee of Shah Jahan's court who gifted the city of Lahore with such sumptuous monuments as Wazir Khan's Mosque and Wazir Khan's Hammam, also known as Shahi Hammam, in the Walled City.

The chronicles record how Wazir Khan, after having completed his spectacular mosque, turned his attention to laying out a fine garden—a garden which became known as Wazir Khan's Nakhlia Garden because of the large number of date-palm trees. In the middle of the Nakhlia Garden he built an elegant baradari, which has carried his name to this day.

The baradari (lit. twelve openings) was so titled because of a sehdara centre and flanking deeply-inset arched openings or peshtaq on each side of the square, resulting in 12 dars or doorways openings. The two storey pavilion-like structure is dominated by four corner belvedere towers, terminated by sloping chajjas (eaves) and capped by cupolas. It is surrounded by pools on all four sides containing fountains which would have provided misty breeze to its occupants in the hot Lahori summers.

As in the case of Anarkali's tomb, this monument also has undergone extensive alterations having served varied functions: as part of Sikh and British cantonments, as the Settlement and Telegraph office, and also as a museum. Its use as Punjab Public Library, was lauded by Latif: "A nobler aim it could not have served. The founder of the building was himself a patron of learning and a profound scholar, and the association of his name with an institution pregnant with such significant results for the rising generation of the Punjab may be regarded as a happy coincidence."