[2] Jagat Singh felt that the City Palace was too public to invite the beautiful young ladies of Udaipur with decadent, moonlit picnics.

[3] The successive rulers used this palace as their summer resort, holding their regal durbars in its courtyards lined with columns, pillared terraces, fountains, and gardens.

Its floor is inlaid with black and white marble, the walls are ornamented with niches and decorated with arabesques of colored stones, the dome is exquisitely beautiful in form.

During the famous Indian Sepoy Mutiny in 1857, several European families fled from Nimach and used the island as an asylum, offered to them by Maharana Swaroop Singh.

About the same time bicyclists Fanny Bullock Workman and her husband William Hunter Workman were distressed by the 'cheap and tasteless style' of the interiors of the water palaces with "an assortment of infirm European furniture, wooden clocks, coloured glass ornaments, and children's toys, all of which seems to the visitor quite out of place, where he would naturally expect a dignified display of Eastern splendor.

"[2] The reign of Maharana Sir Bhopal Singh (1930–55) saw the addition of another pavilion, Chandra Prakash, but otherwise the Jag Niwas remained unaltered and decaying.

He was not in dire straits, mind you, but when he came to the throne he inherited big problems like what to do with the 300 dancing girls that belonged to his predecessor Maharana Bhopal Singh.

They were old crones by this time and on state occasions I remember they would come to sing and dance with their ghunghats [veils] down and occasionally one would lift hers to show a wizened old face underneath.

[1] Former guests have included Lord Curzon, Vivien Leigh, Queen Elizabeth, the Shah of Iran, the king of Nepal and US First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy.