Ghazipur City

Ghazipur ( previously spelled Ghazeepore, Gauspur, and Ghazipour), is a city and

municipal corporation in the state of Uttar Pradesh, India. Ghazipur city is the

administrative headquarters of the Ghazipur district, one of the four districts that form

the Varanasi division of Uttar Pradesh. The city of Ghazipur also constitutes one of the

five distinct tehsils, or subdivisions, of the Ghazipur district. Hindu tradition associates

Ghazipur with a Raja Gaadhi, father of Vishwamitra Maharshi, the great rishi regarded

as a Hindu saint, but although the area was an administrative center since the Gupta

Empire, Ghazipur probably derives its name from the sayyid Masud, given the title

Ghazi, who defeated the local Raja and established a town around 1330 CE. Located by

the Ganges, Ghazipur was a strategically important river port during the British rule of

India.
Ghazipur is well known for its opium factory, established by the British East India

Company in 1820 and still the biggest legal opium factory in the world, producing the

drug for the global pharmaceutical industry. The city's perfume industry, especially

its production of rose oil and attar of roses has also long been famous. A Ghazipur firm

won a medal for these products at the British Empire Exhibition, and the perfume

industry remains important. Other important constituents of the city's commercial life

include handloom weaving factories, and Ghazipur's role as the market town for its

surrounding rural and farming areas.
Sights in the city include several monuments built by Nawab Shaikh Abdulla, or

Abdullah Khan, a governor of Ghazipur during the Mughal Empire in the eighteenth

century, and his son. These include the palace known as Chihal Satun, or "forty pillars",

which retains a very impressive gateway although the palace is in ruins, and the large

garden with a tank and a tomb called the Nawab-ki-Chahar-diwari. The mosque

near this tomb was probably originally a Hindu building. The road that starts at the

Nawab-ki-Chahar-diwari tomb and runs past the mosque leads, after 10 km, to a matha

devoted to Pavhari Baba. The tank and tomb of Pahar Khan, faujdar of the city in

1580, and the plain but ancient tombs of the founder, Masud, and his son are also in

Ghazipur, as is the tomb of Lord Cornwallis, one of the major figures of Indian and

British history. Cornwallis is famous for his role in the American Revolutionary War,

and then for his time as Governor-General of India, being said to have laid the true

foundation of British rule. He was later Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, there suppressing the

1798 Rebellion and establishing the Act of Union. He died in Ghazipur in 1805, soon

after his returning to India for his second appointment as Governor-General. His tomb,

overlooking the Ganges, is a heavy dome supported on 12 Doric columns above a

cenotaph carved by John Flaxman. The remains of an ancient mud fort also overlook

the river, while there are many beautiful or impressive ghats leading to the Ganges, the

oldest of which is the ChitNath Ghat.