Chandpole Bazaar

Chandpole is where Jaipur's grid begins, or ends, depending on which way you are walking. When Sawai Jai Singh II laid out his new capital from 1727, he closed it inside a wall punctured by seven gates and set two of them on a single arrow-straight east-west artery: Suraj Pol, the sun gate, at the sunrise end, and Chandpole, the moon gate, at the western edge where the light goes down.

• The gate still stands, still funnels traffic, and still gives its name to the kilometre of bazaar running east from it toward Chhoti Chaupar.
• That kilometre is the point of a visit, and it is worth being precise about what it is and is not.
• Chandpole Bazaar is a working general bazaar rather than a curated tourist strip: shopfronts under the ochre-pink arcades sell wooden handicrafts and carved furniture, mojri slippers, brassware, textiles, temple supplies, hardware and household everything.
• The marble-idol trade Chandpole is famous for is a lane off it — Khajane Walon ka Rasta, the street of the treasurers — which TasteYatra covers separately.
• Come to the bazaar for breadth and the gate; turn into the rasta for the sculpture.
• The two are linked by an old arrangement.
• Tradition holds that Jai Singh set aside a quarter here for his stone carvers, Silawaton ka Mohalla, and the descendants of that trade still work between Kishanpole and Chandpole in what locals call Murti Mohalla.
• Rough blocks of white Makrana marble arrive by truck and leave as deities.
• You will often hear the chisels before you see them, and watching a carver rough out a figure is free, unhurried and better theatre than most ticketed attractions in the city.
• Vegetarian travellers are on comfortable ground here, but not automatically safe ground.
• Jaipur's old city is vegetarian by default and the halwai stalls along the bazaar are vegetarian by tradition — yet a "pure veg" board here routinely means only "no meat" and says nothing about egg, so ask specifically for eggless before buying any bakery item or cake.
• The dependable fallbacks sit close by: Rawat Misthan Bhandar on Station Road for pyaaz kachori and ghevar, Sahu ki Chai on Chaura Rasta for a glass of kulhad chai, and the rooftop at Ganesh Restaurant near New Gate for a proper thali. Practicalities favour you.
• Chandpole has its own Pink Line metro station a few minutes' walk west of the gate, making this the easiest car-free entrance to the walled city; the line then dives underground and runs beneath the old town to Badi Chaupar.
• Shutters generally go up around 11am and come down by eight or nine, and Sunday is a quiet, half-closed day.
• Ignore any driver or guide offering to take you to a gemstone factory — that detour is Jaipur's oldest tourist trap and has nothing to do with this bazaar.