The Public Works Department, the canal administration and the forest department built rest houses across Punjab: single-storey bungalows with deep verandahs, high ceilings, a caretaker and a visitors' book, at intervals along the canals and the district roads.
They were built so that an officer inspecting works could stay anywhere in his district. Canal rest houses in particular sit on the bank, in a garden, often with old trees, at a place that was chosen for the canal and not for anything else.
The visitors' books, where they survive, are a continuous record of who inspected what, when, and what they thought of it, going back a century.
Many are still in departmental use and can be booked. Others have been abandoned or sold.
They are the most numerous and least noticed piece of colonial-era architecture in Punjab and there is no inventory of them.
A person wanting to see the canal system properly could do it by staying in its own rest houses, which is what they were built for.
The plan is nearly always the same. Two or three rooms in a row, a verandah down the long side, a kitchen block behind, a servant's quarter and a garden inside a hedge. It is a standard drawing issued by a department and repeated across a province, which is why every one of them looks like the last one.
The trees are the other half of it. These gardens were planted with whatever the forest department had, so many of them hold mature specimens of species now uncommon in the plains, standing in an acre of ground that has not been ploughed in a hundred and forty years.
Booking one means a written application to the executive engineer and, in practice, knowing somebody. There is no public list, no published rate and no way to find out that a particular one exists except by driving past it.