Umaid Bhawan Palace Travel Video Guide

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Dominating the city's southeast horizon is the Umaid Bhawan Palace , a colossal Indo-Sarcenic pile commissioned by Maharaja Umaid Singh in 1929 as a famine relief project. One of the largest and most opulent royal abodes in Asia, it kept three thousand labourers gainfully employed for sixteen years and remains a potent symbol of Rajput megalomania, lording it over the modern city from a scrub-covered hill on the outskirts. Surmounted by a helmet-shaped dome, its austere pink sandstone walls and monumental scale recall the Presidential Palace in New Delhi (whose designer, Sir Edwin Lutyens, was much admired by Umaid Bhawan's chief architect, Henry Lanchester). When it was completed in 1944, the building boasted 347 rooms, among them a cinema and indoor swimming pool. The maharaja had little time to savour his achievement, however; only three years after the work was finished he died.

The present incumbent, Maharaja Gaj Singh, occupies only one-third of the palace; the rest is given over to a luxury hotel (see

Accommodation) and a small museum (daily 9am-5pm; Rs50), housed in the old, mural-lined Durbar Hall. Ranks of glass cases, guarded by a retinue of elderly turbaned retainers, enclose the usual array of old clocks, weapons, miniature paintings, porcelain, portraits, silverware and stately garb. While you're here, have a nose around the hotel, whose furniture and fittings are nearly all original 1930s Art Deco, enlivened with lashings of typically Rajasthani gilt and sweeping staircases.

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