City Palace

A boy becomes king at eleven, and inherits a throne and barely enough money to field 1,000 cavalry. By age fifteen, he charms a Mughal emperor into submission with nothing but quick wit, earning a title that translates to “one and a quarter times superior to his contemporaries.”

Sawai Jai Singh II moves his capital from Amber to the newly founded city of Jaipur in 1727, but not before commissioning a Sanskrit translation of Euclid’s “Elements of Geometry” and building five astronomical observatories across India—because what good is founding a city if you can’t also recalculate the cosmos?

The City Palace was built between 1729 and 1732, anchoring a metropolis designed by a junior auditor from Bengal who happened to be an expert in mathematics, craftsmanship, astrology, and Sanskrit. Vidyadhar Bhattacharya used holistic principles of Shilpa Shastra and Vaastu Shastra to create a grid-based city model, dividing Jaipur into nine squares symbolizing the nine planets.

The palace galleries tell their own stories: It now houses the Maharaja Sawai Man Singh II Museum and continues to be the home of the Jaipur royal family. The Textile Gallery holds a 1650 pashmina carpet. The Arms Gallery displays a tulwar once wielded by Maharaja Ram Singh II. The Sabha Niwas features large-format paintings of maharajas who once held court here. And the Transport Gallery? A celebration of every wheeled contraption invented before the combustion engine ruined everything.