On 13 April 1919 troops under Brigadier General Reginald Dyer fired on a crowd in a walled garden at Amritsar. The garden had one narrow main entrance. Firing continued for about ten minutes.
Casualty figures have never been agreed. Official British figures gave 379 dead. Indian estimates run far higher.
Entry is free and unticketed, so no footfall series exists for one of the most visited sites in Punjab.
The Bagh is not a garden. It was a walled patch of waste ground of about three thousand square metres, enclosed by the backs of houses, with one main entrance and several narrow lanes too small to leave by quickly. That geometry is the reason the casualty figure is what it is, and it is why the site itself is the primary evidence.
The crowd had gathered on Baisakhi, the largest day of the Punjabi year, at a public meeting held in defiance of a proclamation that a great many present had not heard. Firing continued for about ten minutes and stopped when the ammunition was nearly exhausted, which is recorded in the Hunter Committee evidence in Dyer's own words.
The well in the Bagh, into which people jumped, is preserved. The bullet marks in the brick are marked. The memorial was designed by the American architect Benjamin Polk and completed in 1961, and the site was substantially rebuilt and reinterpreted in 2021, which was criticised by historians and by descendants for what the redesign removed.