thumb|250x250px|[[Shimla, a city founded as a hill station, served as the summer capital of British India. The city's urban planning and architecture were designed to foster a European experience for homesick colonial officials and executives.]]

A hill station is a type of hill town, mostly in colonial Asia, but also in colonial Africa (albeit rarely), founded by European colonialists as a refuge from the summer heat. As historian Dane Kennedy observes about the Indian context, "the hill station (...) was seen as an exclusive British preserve: here it was possible to render the Indian into an outsider". The term is still used in present day, particularly in India, which has the largest number of hill stations; most are situated at an altitude of approximately .

History

In South Asia

Nandi Hills is an 11th-century hill station that was developed by the Ganga dynasty in present-day Karnataka, India. Tipu Sultan (1751–1799) notably used it as a summer retreat.

Hill stations in British India were established for a variety of reasons. One of the first reasons in the early 1800s was to act as sanitoria for the ailing family members of British officials. After the rebellion of 1857, the British "sought further distance from what they saw as a disease-ridden land by [escaping] to the Himalayas in the north". Other factors included anxieties about the dangers of life in India, among them "fear of degeneration brought on by too long residence in a debilitating land". The hill stations were meant to reproduce the home country, illustrated in Lord Lytton's statement about Ootacamund in the 1870s as having "such beautiful English rain, such delicious English mud." Shimla was officially made the "summer capital of India" in the 1860s and hill stations "served as vital centres of political and military power, especially after the 1857 revolt."

As noted by Indian historian Vinay Lal, hill stations in India also served "as spaces for the colonial structuring of a segregational and ontological divide between Indians and Europeans, and as institutional sites of imperial power." William Dalrymple wrote that "[t]he viceroy was the spider at the heart of Simla's web: From his chambers in the Viceregal Lodge, he pulled the strings of an empire that stretched from Rangoon in the east to Aden in the west." Meanwhile, Judith T Kenny observed that the hill station was "a landscape type tied to nineteenth-century discourses of imperialism and climate. Both discourses serve as evidence of a belief in racial difference and, thereby, the imperial hill station reflected and reinforced a framework of meaning that influenced European views of the non-western world in general." Speaking about the development of hill stations like Mussoorie, Shekhar Pathak, historian of Himalayan cultures, noted that "the needs of this (European) elite created colonies in Dehradun of Indians to cater to them." This "exclusive, clean, and secure social space – known as an enclave – for white Europeans ... evolved to become the seats of government and foci of elite social activity", and created racial distinctions which perpetuated British colonial power and oppression, as Nandini Bhattacharya notes. Dane Kennedy observed that "the hill station, then, was seen as an exclusive British preserve: here it was possible to render the Indian into an outsider".

  • Karuizawa

Vietnam

thumb|[[Da Lat, Vietnam]]

  • Da Lat
  • Sa Pa
  • Tam Đảo
  • Bà Nà Hills
  • Bạch Mã National Park

Oceania

Australia

thumb|[[Mount Macedon, Victoria]]

thumb|[[Bardon, Queensland ]]

Victoria
  • Mount Macedon
  • Harrietville
South Australia
  • Mount Gambier
  • Adelaide Hills
Queensland
  • Toowoomba
  • Merewether
  • The Gap
  • Chapel Hill
  • Bardon
  • Ferny Grove
  • Buderim
  • New Auckland
  • Mount Archer
Western Australia
  • Lesmurdie
  • Kalamunda
  • Jarrahdale
  • Bedfordale
New South Wales
  • Blue Mountains
  • Mount Pleasant
  • Woonoona
  • Kariong
  • Illawarra escarpment (Stanwell Tops)
  • Prospect Hill (Pemulwuy)
  • Terrey Hills
  • Berowra Heights

See also

  • Summer capital
  • Summer colony
  • Tierra templada
  • Tierra fría
  • Plateau
  • Tableland
  • Mesa

References

Bibliography

  • Crossette, Barbara. The Great Hill Stations of Asia. .
  • Kennedy, Dane. The Magic Mountains: Hill Stations and the British Raj. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996. , .