Hunza

The valley

Hunza occupies a narrow valley in the Karakoram beneath Rakaposhi, on the route to the Mintaka and Khunjerab passes into the Tarim basin. Its terraced irrigation, drawing glacier meltwater along channels cut across cliff faces, supports orchards and fields in a place with almost no rainfall, and represents an engineering tradition of great antiquity.

The Burusho speak Burushaski, a language isolate with no demonstrated relationship to any other language family — one of a small number worldwide, and a standing puzzle for historical linguistics. Its survival in a high Karakoram valley suggests it is the remnant of a language distribution that predates the arrival of Indo-Aryan and Tibetan speakers.

Hunza's rulers, titled Mir or Tham, held the fort at Baltit, a stone and timber structure of some seven hundred years, restored in the 1990s by the Aga Khan Trust for Culture.

Raiders and empires

Hunza's economy long included the raiding of caravans on the Kashgar route and the sale of captives, which brought the British Gilgit Agency into conflict with it. The Hunza-Nagar campaign of 1891 ended the practice and made the state a British protectorate — an episode in the Great Game, since Hunza had also been in contact with the Russians and with Kashgar.

The population is largely Ismaili and follows the Aga Khan. The state acceded to Pakistan in 1947 and was abolished in 1974; the Karakoram Highway, opened in 1978, ended the valley's isolation entirely.