House of Wonders

This guide to the House of Wonders in Zanzibar City opens with Sultan Barghash bin Said's one-word refusal to a British treaty in 1873, and the standoff with consul John Kirk that followed near the old slave market steps from here. It traces how that reversal reshaped the island's economy before Barghash raised this palace a decade later, with cast-iron verandas and technology that made it a first for East Africa. Zanzibaris came to call it Beit al-Ajaib, the House of Wonders, a name that still hangs over the veranda you're standing beneath.