Queen of the Hills — colonial Raj summer capital among the Himalayan deodars
Shimla is the capital of Himachal Pradesh — a Himalayan hill station at 2,200m altitude that served as the summer capital of British India from 1864 to 1947, when the entire imperial government moved up here each summer to escape the plains heat. The Mall Road, Christ Church (1857), and the Vice-Regal Lodge (now the Institute of Advanced Study) are among the finest colonial-era buildings in Asia, set against terraced hillsides of cedar and oak.
Shimla was a small Nepalese hill settlement before the British East India Company discovered it in 1819. The Commander-in-Chief Lord Combermere made it the official British summer capital in 1822, and it became the nerve centre of the Raj's bureaucracy for over a century — the Simla Convention of 1914 setting Tibet's borders, and the Simla Conference of 1945 that preceded Indian partition, were both held here. The Kalka-Shimla Railway (1903), a UNESCO World Heritage Site, brought the government up 96km of mountain track at a maximum speed of 25km/h.