Garden of Dreams (Swapna Bagaicha)

In 1920, the Rana aristocrat Kaiser Shamsher Jang Bahadur Rana had six pavilions, a reflecting pool, pergolas and terraced parterres built inside his Kaiser Mahal estate in Kathmandu, calling it the Garden of Six Seasons. It is a private Edwardian garden set down whole in the Himalayan foothills: axial paths, a colonnaded amphitheatre, urns and balustrades in a neoclassical vocabulary the Rana elite had absorbed on visits to Britain and then had built at home, in brick and painted stucco rather than stone. Kaiser Shamsher’s death in 1964 left the garden to decades of neglect, and in 1998 the government of Nepal moved to demolish what survived for a shopping centre; Minister of Education Arjun Narsingha KC halted the demolition and reopened the site to the public under a new name, the Garden of Dreams. An Austrian-funded restoration led by the architect Götz Hagmüller reconstructed the garden between 2000 and 2007, recovering three of the original six pavilions and the amphitheatre. It is now the most visited public garden in Kathmandu.