History of Hunza

The Burusho, also known as the Burushas, are known to inhabit three rugged mountainous areas of northern Pakistan known as the Hunza, the Nagar, and the Yasin Valleys. However, most of the Burusho live in the Hunza Valley. No one seems to know the exact origin of the Burusho but according to a legend, three soldiers from the army of Alexander the Great came and settled in the Hunza Valley around 300 BC. Another legend that says that the Burusho were driven from northwestern India into Pakistan by Indo-Aryan invaders. For hundreds of years the territory of Hunza was ruled by a prince. Then from 1892 until 1949 the British ruled this territory. In 1949, Pakistan gained control of Hunza when a truce made by the United Nations brought an end to the fighting between Pakistan and India. The Burusho are a proud people and they are very warm and friendly. Most of them are farmers but some are involved in tourism and trade.

Some of the Burushas serve in the military or work for the government. The family ties of the Burusho are very important. The husband is always the head of the household. The Burusho usually do not intermarry with other ethnic groups in the area, not even the Hunza or Nagar Burusho. Their houses are built of concrete or stone and are not very warm during the winter months. Kerosene is often used for heating because wood is scarce. The Burusho eat mainly fruits, grains, and vegetables. Some of their favorites are peaches , apricots, and nuts. They raise sheep, cattle, and goats for milk and wool. Their chief industries are production of woolen cloth and dried apricots.

The spoken language of the Burusho people is “Burushaski”. It is their primary language but is not yet a written language. Qualified workers are needed to develop a written language for the Burusho . The Hunza, Nagar, and Yasin Valleys all have a distinct dialect. Most similarities are found between the Hunza and Nagar dialects. Urdu is the national language of Pakistan and is also the secondary language of the Burusho.

The setting of the Baltit Fort is arguably unrivalled in Pakistan. It is set at the head of the Hunza Valley in the Northern Areas amongst some of the highest mountains of the world, overlooking the valley settlements which it was built to protect. While it has lost its defensive role in modern times, the Fort remains a symbol of the region's history and culture. It is a synthesis of the architectural form, domestic lifestyle and belief systems of the region, providing insight into the values of the Hunza people.

 Altit Fort Hunza

Altit Fort is situated in the village of Altit, about 3 km from Karimabad. It has been built on a sheer rock-cliff that falls 300 meters (1000 feet) into the Hunza River, and is much older than the Baltit Fort.

View of Altit fort, with the central town to the right and below the fort. The extreme gullies, sharp drop-off, and location high above the river made this settlement highly defensible and an older settlement than many in the central valley. 

The souls that paved the way for the modern tarmac road named the Karakoram Highway still seem to flicker amongst the sharp moving shadows of the unstable rocks and the almost countless but crumbly lucent glaciers that constantly threaten it's existence. There has always been a long pass into, and out of China over what is sometimes called the 'roof of the world' but in ancient times it was a very perilous pathway.

Extant writings, etched in a fourth century A.D. Chinese travelers diary, record ' The trail was very precipitous, and vertigo accompanied us as we edged along it...' The path was certainly narrow, and often clung to the sheer faces of the many deep resonant gorges that still confine their turgid, animated rivers. Even today, one can still see vestiges of an old crumbling trail high up above the present road. Although it is not the same trail that this particular merchant scrabbled breathlessly along, if one scrambles up to it and edges along it for a few meters, one can experience the same feelings of dizziness and danger that the diarist wrote about.

The new wide metal led road also winds along high palisade like cliffs in some places, and sometimes short sections of the tarmac rumble down into the river below or become buried under tones of rock and mud. However a modern traveler on this modern road will not experience the same fear or vertigo as the ancients.

The present highway is also popularly called the 'Silk Route' by many romantics because it approximates the trail of what was once one of the many silk, jade and spice carrying caravan trails that congregated somewhere near Xian, in China, and terminated in the vicinity of modern Syria on the Mediterranean sea coast. Like long lines of exploring ants, determined traders, merchants, and adventurers wore a path through narrow gorges, high grass sheathed valleys, across waterless deserts, around 6,000 meter - and higher mountains, and over raging rivers in pursuit of barter.

The passage of time hasn't altered any of these geophysical conditions, nor were the reasons for building this new road (apart from its obvious military significance) any different from the ancients reasons for undertaking such a hazardous journey. The new road was built to facilitate trade between China and Pakistan.

Tourist literature published by the Pakistan Tourist Authorities states that the road took twenty years to build. The pamphlets also mention the amount of earth moved, rocks blasted out of the way and more poignantly, the number of men and women, both Pakistani and Chinese who died in this great joint engineering feat.

Although the brochures write that it 'took twenty years to build', the road is in fact never finished! Because of the uniqueness of it's geophysical surroundings, constant natural activity frequently destroys sections of the highway. A small army of workers are on hand to reroute the road and join the new sections to the ends of the undamaged highway. The road in other words, is constantly being moved!

Put very simply, the road meanders through an area where highly active tectonic plate pressure is causing mountains to grow faster than the elements can wear them down! Swift flowing rivers and the measurable movements of glaciers crush, undercut and wash away the sides of these same mountains contributing to the constant rock falls and landslides that changes the face of the land almost daily! This uniquely accelerated geological activity can be felt, seen, and heard if one sits quietly on any high vantage point for a few hours. The road is in fact an observable reflection of man's incessant, but unequal struggle against nature's transcendental power.

Starting near Rawalpindi, the bitumen sealed motorway winds through gently rolling, sandy foothills for approximately one hundred and twenty kilometers before intersecting the Indus river. (Called the 'Sind' by the Urdu language speaking Pakistanis) it then twines along the Indus's arc north eastward to within forty kilometers of the town of Gilgit.

Between these two points, (about four hundred kilometers) the road sometimes takes on a 'roller-coaster' aspect as it dips into, and out of the Indus's wide river bed. The final dip is at this forty kilometers point when the road joins the Gilgit river and continues to within twelve kilometers of the town of that name, then swings North, crossing the Gilgit river to join the Hunza river. The town of Gilgit is twelve kilometers off the actual Karakoram highway and is reached by a fairly smoothly laid and slightly inclined tarred road.

Although the Karakoram Highway inclines upwards the whole way to the pass it's not until you get close to Gilgit that you begin to feel as if you are in mountains. Even so, the town is only at one thousand, five hundred meters (approx. five thousand feet) elevation and there is still a feeling of being in desert. The barren, dust laden and tan colored hills that surround the area give the impression of being made from sand, however, it only takes a ride of a couple of kilometers north from Gilgit for one to get the impression of being in 'real' mountains - very high, and very sheer mountains.

This is not to say that the actual road itself is steep - it's not, it's just that the demarcation between the almost sand dune like foothills, and the seemingly abrupt line of six to eight thousand meters high glacier and snow plaited mountains is almost overpoweringly awesome.

The road then accompanies the Hunza river through these mountains, climbing gently almost all the way to the 4,700 metre high Khunjerab Pass. Only during the last twenty-odd kilometers from the top of the pass will you find short stretches of consistently steep road gradients of six to fourteen degrees. At the top of the pass, two tall memorial stones show that this is the convenient dividing line between political Pakistan, and political China. Both countries respective customs and immigration posts are some kilometers away on their respective sides of the pass. Sust, the Pakistan customs post is ninety kilometres before the peak. Tax organ, the Chinese customs post and town of that name, is one hundred and thirty kilometers from the peak.

The pass also separates two differently named mountain ranges, the Karakoram range (on the Pakistani side), from the Pamir in China. Within these two massive ranges, there are other named but smaller clusters of rugged mountains, and a quick glance at a map can confuse one as there is no illustrated way that one can separate one range from the next.

On the Chinese side of the pass the road is given a different name by the Chinese, who call it, loosely translated, 'The Big Pakistan/China Friendship Road'. This continuation of the Karakoram is also smoothly finished and well graded. It scrolls up and down through generally wide valleys for approximately four hundred and fifty kilometers to the camel market town of Kashgar, which is in the mostly Taklamakan desert filled Chinese province of Xingjian.

As most travelers consider the Karakoram highway and the Big Pakistan-China Friendship Road to be one and the same, I have done so in this guide, with the exception that I refer to the Chinese road's by their route numbers. All Chinese roads have designated route numbers and periodic 'kilometer' markers tell you what numbered road, or track you are on at any given time, for example, the Chinese side of the Karakoram road is route number 314, and you can stay on this route half way across China.