Garden of Dreams

The Garden of Dreams (Swapna Bagaicha) is a walled Edwardian garden of just over half a hectare, hidden behind a high wall on the edge of Thamel and directly opposite the Narayanhiti palace grounds. It was built in 1920 for Field Marshal Kaiser Shumsher Jung Bahadur Rana, a son of the Rana prime minister Chandra Shumsher, reportedly with an inheritance he won from his father at cards. The design is attributed to Kishore Narshingh, the royal architect who had already built Singha Durbar for Kaiser's father — which makes this garden and that palace two halves of one architectural moment.

The plan was unusual and deliberately literary: six pavilions, one for each of the six Nepali seasons, arranged around a sunken pond, an amphitheatre, pergolas, urns, balustrades and fountains, in a European neoclassical vocabulary that has no precedent in Newar garden-making. Three of the six pavilions survive — Basanta (spring), Grishma (summer) and Barsha (monsoon) — along with the pond and much of the stonework. The Sharad, Hemanta and Shishir pavilions are gone.

After Kaiser Shumsher's death in 1964 the garden passed to the state and decayed for three decades under the Ministry of Education, which still occupies Kaiser Mahal, the mansion on the northern edge; the Field Marshal's personal library of some fifty thousand volumes remains there as the Kaiser Library. The garden itself was restored between 2000 and 2007 with funding from the Austrian government and reopened to the public in 2007. The restoration was conservative rather than speculative: what could be documented was rebuilt, and what could not was left as ruin or lawn.

It is the easiest Rana-era building in Kathmandu to actually get inside, which is why it matters on an itinerary. Singha Durbar is a working government secretariat and closed; most Rana palaces are ministries, army property or schools. This one charges a small entry fee, has a cafe in the old pavilion, and sits five minutes' walk from Thamel's main junction — a genuinely quiet hour in the noisiest part of the city.