MORE than 160 years after the British burnt down much of Kabul in revenge for the massacre of their retreating army, the Prince of Wales has launched a multi-million-pound foundation to restore the ancient city from its most recent round of warfare.

The Turquoise Mountain Foundation, over which the prince presides jointly with Hamid Karzai, the Afghan president, will focus on rebuilding Murad Khane, the last remaining medieval part of the city, in the hope of turning it into a heritage centre. It will also set up schools to revive traditional Afghan crafts such as woodcarving, ceramics and calligraphy.

“Turquoise Mountain was the greatest indigenous Afghan capital of the Middle Ages, destroyed by Genghis Khan in 1216 and lost to history,” the prince said. “I hope this Turquoise Mountain will help breathe new life into Afghanistan’s unique and incomparable art and architecture for this and future generations.”

The project is the result of a friendship between Charles and Karzai struck up during the Afghan’s visit to Britain last year, when he dined at Highgrove.

When Karzai expressed concern that Afghanistan’s traditional skills were dying out after years of war, and that Kabul’s old city was being flattened by warlords and drug barons who wanted to build blue-glass buildings and gaudy wedding-cake houses, the prince decided to act. He arranged for Karzai to visit Prince’s Trust projects in London and offered to set up an Afghan equivalent.

Charles asked Rory Stewart, a writer, adventurer, diplomat and former governor of two Iraqi provinces, who is passionate about Afghanistan, to go to Kabul and devise a proposal combining historic restoration with youth skills training.

Stewart decided on a site on the north bank of the river Kabul near the old bird market, where songbirds and fighting cocks vie for space. Murad Khane is 12 acres of winding alleys and mud-wall buildings that was badly bombed during more than two decades of war.

Commerce is once again thriving, with stalls piled high with mangos, onions and rubber buckets fashioned from old car tyres, as well as tiny jewellers’ shops selling silver and turquoise. But most of the buildings are derelict, the area is piled high with rubbish and a green trickle of sewage runs along the streets of the city of 3.5m with no sewers or running water. Stewart chose Murad Khane partly because it was difficult. “I wanted to do something bold and urgent,” he said.

Amid the rubble, Stewart discovered old merchants’ houses that retained the carved wooden jalis or lattice frames and movable shutters but are nowadays inhabited mostly by pigeons.

In a sweet seller’s former home, a collapsed staircase leads unexpectedly to an enchanting room of carved wood flowers and peacocks, moulded plaster niches and coloured glass. “I think this is just magical,” said Stewart. “Imagine if this was all replaced by shoddy brick and glass?” But he admitted: “It’s really an Olympian challenge and requires an almost megalomaniac level of confidence to think we can succeed.”

Stewart, 33, is the right person. He spent 2003-04 as acting and then deputy governor of two provinces in southern Iraq. Over the past few months he has conducted talks with elders of the local Qizilbash community to overcome their incomprehension. “They can’t understand what on earth we are doing and think there must be some hidden motive,” he said. “The notion that we would do up a house on a 20 to 30-year lease and give it back to them makes no sense.”

But he found an unlikely advocate in Pahlawan Aziz, a former wrestling champion who guards the old Shia shrine in succession to his father and grandfather. Aziz, who says he was the only person to stay in Murad Khane through the bombing and the Taliban years, said: “Everything was destroyed all around but not even one rocket touched the shrine . . . It was a miracle and when the Taliban tried to destroy the shrine, three horsemen appeared at every entrance to stop them.”

Aziz is enthusiastic about the prince’s project. “We old citizens of Kabul suffered so much that protection of this area would be like dropping water in the mouth of a thirsty man,” he said. “It is fitting that the British who destroyed so much should now be restoring [it].”

Using the prince’s name, staff and contacts, Stewart has persuaded anonymous donors to contribute £2.3m over three years. Karzai put up a preservation order and the plan is to restore three or four merchant’s houses as showpiece galleries and workshops.

Murad Khane is a short walk from Afghanistan’s first five-star hotel, the Kabul Serena, and Stewart hopes to entice guests to visit. “Any time a tourist goes somewhere, it’s always the old city they want to see,” he said.

Such tourism may be some time off. The hotel’s ground floor windows were concreted over after anti-western riots.

Stewart has rented an 18th-century mud fortress in which he has set up a school based on Charles’s School of Traditional Arts in London.

“A crucial part of the project will be to enable young Afghans to see these skills as living traditions,” Charles said.

Karzai sent a gift of a traditional silk jacket to the Duchess of Cornwall in gratitude. “I am very happy that the prince has chosen Kabul to be the home of a regional school of Islamic art. It is recognition of Afghanistan as a historical meeting place of diverse cultures,” he said.

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