The Residency, Lucknow

The Residency was the official quarters of the British Resident at the court of the Nawabs of Awadh, built between 1780 and 1800 as a Greco-Roman bungalow complex. After the British annexed Awadh in 1856, the Residency became the central object of one of the great sieges of the 1857 Indian Rebellion — the 87-day Siege of Lucknow, in which 3,000 British and Indian loyalists held out against a force of perhaps 100,000 rebels. The siege ended on 17 November 1857 when Sir Colin Campbell's relief column finally broke through. The British, on Lord Canning's order, deliberately preserved the Residency in its bullet-pocked, shell-damaged state — every Union Jack on the British Empire was lowered to half-mast every night except this one, where a flag flew 24 hours to commemorate the siege. The garden cemetery holds the graves of around 2,000 of the besieged who died, including the wife of the British Resident Sir Henry Lawrence. The complex includes the Banqueting Hall (now a museum with siege-period photographs and weapons), the Treasury, Dr Fayrer's house, and the Begum Kothi. Photography permitted throughout. Allow two hours; the gardens are large and contemplative.