Karachi, 1729 to Today: How a Mud-Walled Fishing Town Became a 20-Million Megacity

In 1729, merchants whose old harbour had silted up built a small mud-walled town of about 35 acres on a creek by the Arabian Sea, with fishing huts on the shore outside and the island of Kiamari across the mudflats. Watch it pass to the Talpur Mirs, then to the British in 1839, grow into the cantonment and port of Saddar, Frere Hall and Empress Market, become the first capital of Pakistan in 1947, and spread to more than 20 million people. Somewhere along the way the coast itself starts to move. The eras and landmarks come from the Imperial Gazetteer of India (1908), the writings of the Karachi architect and planner Arif Hasan, the Census of India and the censuses of Pakistan. Some of the dates: the Talpurs take the town in 1795; a British warship shells the Manora fort on 3 February 1839; the Napier Mole joins Kiamari to the town in 1854; Frere Hall opens in 1865 and Empress Market is finished in 1889; plague reaches the old town in December 1896 and kills nearly 3,400 people in its first year; Mazar-e-Quaid is inaugurated in 1971. The population readout runs from Commander Carless's estimate of about 14,000 in 1838, through 56,753 in the census of 1872 and 386,655 in 1941, to 20.4 million in the 2023 digital census. What you see is a reconstruction. The 1729 walls are traced along Rampart Row, River Road and Haji Abdullah Street, the streets that replaced them, and are placed to within about 50 to 100 metres. The extent of each era is hand-drawn from maps and descriptions, and buildings are shown by era style (flat mud roofs, colonial bungalows, yellow Gizri stone, concrete, glass), not house by house. The land taken from the sea is placed from plans and descriptions: the Clifton seafront's date (1990) is a round figure, and the reclaimed part of DHA Phase VIII is an estimate. There is no count before 1838, so the readout shows none. Census boundaries change over time (town, then city, then Karachi Division), and the 2017 count is widely held to be an undercount. Where sources disagree (the walls came down in 1848, 1849 or 1860; the Manora fort dates from 1779 or 1797), the video uses 1849 and 1797. It started inside 35 acres of mud wall, and it is still building out into the sea. 0:00 Karachi today 0:11 Kolachi 0:49 The Talpur Port 1:23 Napier's Harbour 2:16 The Victorian Port 3:04 Gateway to Sindh 3:52 Refugee Capital 4:32 The Industrial City 5:11 The Megacity 5:43 Towers on the Shore Map data © OpenStreetMap contributors, available under the Open Database License (ODbL) Terrain: Terrain Tiles on AWS (Mapzen/Tilezen joerd), from SRTM, GMTED2010, ETOPO1, NED/3DEP and other sources; see https://github.com/tilezen/joerd/blob... #history #timelapse #3d #cities