History of Gilgit: From the Silk Road to Today

The history of Gilgit is the history of a river junction that every power in the region wanted. It was a Buddhist kingdom fought over by Tang China and Tibet in the 7th and 8th centuries, the seat of the Trakhan rajas until about 1810, a Dogra garrison town and British agency during the Great Game, and it joined Pakistan after the Gilgit Scouts overthrew the Maharaja's governor on 1 November 1947.

Most people drive through on the way to Hunza and see none of this. This guide sets the story out in order with the dates, then lists what survives and where to find it within half a day of the bazaar.

A Buddhist kingdom on the trade route

Gilgit sits where the Hunza river joins the Gilgit river, upstream of the Indus, on the old route between Kashmir, the upper Indus and Central Asia. Buddhism travelled north along it. The Chinese pilgrims Faxian, who was in the region between 399 and 414, and Xuanzang, between 627 and 645, both left accounts of the country they crossed.

From the 6th to the 8th century the town was the capital of the Patola Shahis, a line of Buddhist kings. Tang dynasty records call their kingdom Little Palola, or Lesser Bolu, and Baltistan Great Palola. Around 650 Gilgit came under Chinese overlordship; by the late 600s the rising Tibetan empire had taken it; and the two fought over it until the mid-700s, when a rebellion at home pulled the Chinese armies back. Tibet then held the region until the late 800s.

Two things survive from this period. The first is the Kargah Buddha, a standing figure about 15 metres high cut into a cliff 10 km west of the town, usually dated to the 7th century. Local legend has turned it into a man-eating giantess pinned to the rock by a holy man.

The second is the Gilgit manuscripts. In 1931 a set of Buddhist texts written on birch bark was found in a ruined stupa near Kargah, and a monastery and three stupas were excavated there the same year. The manuscripts date from the 5th and 6th centuries, are among the oldest in the world, and are on UNESCO's Memory of the World register. None is in Gilgit: many are in the National Archives of India in Delhi, others went to a museum in Srinagar, and two are in the British Library.

The Trakhan rajas

After the Tibetans, the record goes quiet and legend takes over. Gilgit tradition tells of Shri Badat, the last king of the old line, a cannibal who demanded a child a day until his own daughter helped a prince named Azur Jamshid to kill him. The prince married her and founded the dynasty later called Trakhan.

What is firmer is that the Trakhan rajas, who used the title Ra, ruled Gilgit for centuries and were Muslim from about the 14th century. The best remembered is a queen, Dadi Jawari, who ruled in the 17th century and built irrigation channels. The line ended with the death of Raja Abbas around 1810. The mirs of Hunza and Nagar also claimed descent from it.

Fifty years of war

The half century after 1810 ruined the valley. Rajas from Yasin, Punial and Nagar took the town from one another in turn. In 1841 a landslide below Hatu Pir dammed the Indus and turned the valley into a lake before it burst.

In 1842 a Sikh force from Kashmir under Nathu Shah drove out the Yasin ruler Gohar Aman and left a garrison. Four years later, under the Treaty of Amritsar of 1846, Kashmir and its dependencies passed to Gulab Singh of Jammu, and Dogra troops replaced the Sikhs. Hunza attacked in 1848. In 1852 the people of Gilgit, with Gohar Aman, rose and threw the Dogras out, and he held the town until he died in 1860, when Dogra forces retook it for good.

The Great Game and the Gilgit Agency

By the 1870s Russia was advancing across Central Asia, and British India began to worry about the passes north of Gilgit. A British officer on special duty was posted here from 1877 until the early 1880s to watch them. In 1889 a permanent Political Agent was installed, and the Gilgit Agency came to cover Hunza, Nagar, Punial, Yasin, Ishkoman, Ghizer and Chilas as well as the town.

The arrangement was awkward: the Maharaja of Jammu and Kashmir had a governor in Gilgit, and the British agent sat beside him. In 1891 the Agency fought a short campaign that brought Hunza and Nagar under its control. In 1935 the British ended the dual rule by leasing Gilgit from the Maharaja for 60 years.

The oldest British trace in town predates all this. The explorer George Hayward, sent by the Royal Geographical Society to survey the Pamirs, was murdered near the Darkot Pass in July 1870 and buried in an orchard in Gilgit, which became the British cemetery.

1 November 1947

The lease was handed back in the summer of 1947, weeks before independence, and the Maharaja sent a governor, Brigadier Ghansara Singh. The local force, the Gilgit Scouts, was commanded by a British officer, Major William Brown.

When the Maharaja acceded to India on 26 October, Gilgit's Muslim population and its soldiers would not follow. On 1 November 1947 the Scouts took the governor into custody without bloodshed, in an operation Brown had planned under the code name Datta Khel. Muslim troops of the state army at Bunji, under Captain Mirza Hassan Khan, joined them. The Pakistan flag was raised in Gilgit on 2 November.

A provisional government under a local raja, Shah Rais Khan, lasted 16 days. On 16 November a Pakistani political agent, Khan Mohammad Alam Khan, arrived and took over. Our guide to Gilgit-Baltistan Independence Day covers the rising and how 1 November is marked.

Since 1947

Pakistan governed the area as the Gilgit Agency until 1974, when Zulfikar Ali Bhutto abolished the old princely arrangements and it became the Federally Administered Northern Areas. The Karakoram Highway, built with China, was completed in 1979 and opened to the public in 1986, which made Gilgit the main road junction of the north. Our Karakoram Highway history guide tells that story.

The region was renamed Gilgit-Baltistan under a self-governance order approved on 29 August 2009, which created an elected assembly, and a further order followed in 2018. Because its status is tied to the Kashmir dispute, it is still not a province under the constitution. A provisional provincial status was announced in 2020, and at the time of writing the constitutional amendment to give it effect had not been passed.

What you can still see

All of these are within about 10 km of the bazaar, and a hired car covers them in half a day.

• Kargah Buddha, 10 km west up the Kargah stream. The site of the 1931 excavation is about 400 metres further up.
• Danyor rock inscriptions, a large boulder with 7th and 8th century inscriptions, across the river on the Karakoram Highway side.
• The Chinese cemetery at Danyor, about 10 km from the centre, laid out in 1970 for the Chinese workers who died building the highway.
• The old British cemetery, near the Shahi polo ground on Khazana Road, with Hayward's grave among 18. It was restored in 2002.
• The bazaar, still the trading centre of the region. See our Gilgit bazaar guide.

There is no large museum of this history in Gilgit, so read first and then go and look. If you are coming by road, note that the UK government advises against travel on the Karakoram Highway between Mansehra and Chilas; the Babusar road avoids that stretch in summer, and foreign-passport holders should check their own advice, as it affects insurance. Our Gilgit and Hunza guide and the Gilgit, Hunza and Khunjerab itinerary show how the town fits into a trip.

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