Jalalabad, the capital of Nangarhar Province, lies in a broad, warm valley in eastern Afghanistan, about 575 metres above sea level. The Kabul River runs along the city’s northern edge, and at Jalalabad it is joined by the Kunar, a large glacier-fed river flowing down from the mountains to the north. With its mild winters and its gardens of oranges and other citrus, the city has long been a green, gentle place between the high plateau of Kabul and the plains of Peshawar.
On the road to the Khyber
Jalalabad stands near the western approach to the Khyber Pass, roughly midway between Kabul, about 120 kilometres to the west as the crow flies, and Peshawar, about 110 kilometres to the east. For centuries this position made it a meeting point of trade and culture between Central and South Asia. Historians often note that the city has looked to Peshawar for its commerce and to Kabul for its politics.
The Mughals knew the valley well. Babur, founder of the Mughal Empire, described Nangarhar on his first journey toward India in 1505, remarking on how its climate, trees, birds and customs differed from those of Kabul. His grandson Akbar reshaped the town and drew it firmly into the Mughal realm, and in 1610 Jahangir laid out gardens at Nimla, about 40 kilometres to the south-west.
Hadda and the Buddhist past
Long before Islam, the Jalalabad region was a Buddhist centre within the wider world of Gandhara. The Chinese pilgrims Faxian in the 5th century and Xuanzang in the 7th described its holy places, and Xuanzang wrote of thousands of monks living in about a hundred monasteries. Hadda, about 11 kilometres south of the city, was famed for shrines said to hold relics of the Buddha, including part of his skull.
Excavations at Hadda from the 1920s onward uncovered hundreds of stucco and clay sculptures, one of the largest bodies of Buddhist art from the first centuries CE. Their Greek and Roman influences are striking: the Buddha’s protector Vajrapani, for example, appears in the guise of Heracles. Finds were divided between the National Museum in Kabul and the Musée Guimet in Paris.
A winter garden
Thanks to its near-tropical warmth, Jalalabad served for generations, together with Peshawar, as a winter retreat for the Kabul elite, and nomadic families also came down to the valley for the cold months. Amir Habibullah (r. 1901–19) built the Seraj al-Emarat palace in the city centre. He, his son Amanullah and Queen Soraya are buried in a mausoleum in Jalalabad.
The valley is famously fertile. Besides oranges, tangerines, grapefruit, lemons and limes, it produces pomegranates, rice, wheat and sugar cane, and its lumps of brown cane sugar, gura in Pashto, are prized in both Kabul and Peshawar.
Orange blossom and poetry
Each spring, when the orange trees come into flower, Jalalabad celebrates Narenj Gul, the Orange Blossom Festival. For more than sixty years it has been a gathering for Afghan poetry and writing. In 2010 more than ten thousand people attended, among them writers and poets from across Afghanistan and Pashto poets from across the border in Pakistan, who came to recite their verses as the city filled with the scent of blossom.