Lahore

Lahore's origins are lost in legend — tradition makes Loh, a son of Rama, its founder — but it enters recorded history in the 11th century, when the Ghaznavids took the city and made it their eastern capital. The Sufi scholar Ali Hujwiri, revered as Data Ganj Bakhsh, settled there in the same century and his shrine became the spiritual anchor of the city. Sultanate rulers and Mongol raids followed until the Mughals arrived in the 16th century.

Under the Mughals Lahore was, for long stretches, the empire's working capital. Akbar rebuilt the fort and enclosed the city with brick walls and gates in the 1580s; Jahangir and Shah Jahan added palaces, the Wazir Khan Mosque, the Shahi Hammam and the Shalimar Gardens; Aurangzeb raised the Badshahi Mosque in 1673. Decline came with the empire: Nadir Shah and Ahmad Shah Durrani plundered the city in the 18th century and the Sikh misls fought over it, until Ranjit Singh took it in 1799 and made it the capital of the Sikh Empire, stripping and reusing Mughal buildings as he built his own.

The British annexed Punjab in 1849. They laid out the Mall and the civil lines beyond the old walls, built colleges, the High Court and the museum in a hybrid Indo-Saracenic style, and made Lahore the intellectual centre of northern India. At a session here in 1940 the Muslim League passed the resolution calling for a Muslim homeland. Partition in 1947 remade the city violently: its large Hindu and Sikh populations fled east, Muslim refugees arrived from Indian Punjab, and Lahore found itself a frontier city a few kilometres from a hostile border. It has since grown into a metropolis of many millions, with restoration work returning parts of the walled city to something like its Mughal appearance.

Lahore calls itself the cultural capital of Pakistan and defends the title loudly. It is the home of Urdu and Punjabi publishing, of the country's film industry — the studios on Multan Road gave Lollywood its name — and of a theatre tradition that runs from state-funded drama at the Alhamra to bawdy commercial stage shows. Qawwali, the devotional singing of the Sufi shrines, is heard at Data Darbar on Thursday nights, and the poets Bulleh Shah, Waris Shah and Muhammad Iqbal are quoted in ordinary conversation.

Education is part of the identity: Government College, Punjab University, Aitchison College and the National College of Arts have shaped Pakistan's professional and artistic elite for well over a century, and old-school loyalties run deep. So does sport — cricket in every open space and at Gaddafi Stadium, and a strong wrestling tradition in the old city's akharas.

Manners are formal and generous. Guests are pressed to eat, invitations are repeated until accepted, and elders are greeted first. Dress is modest for both sexes, heads are covered in mosques and shrines, and shoes are removed at the threshold of a home or a place of worship. Weddings are long, loud, multi-day affairs with dhol drums and mountains of food. The city's older families measure status by which mohalla of the walled city they came from, and the saying "jinnay Lahore nai vekhya, o jammya nai" — one who has not seen Lahore has not been born — is repeated without irony.

Something over 14 million people live in Lahore, making it the second-largest city in Pakistan after Karachi and one of the largest in South Asia. Growth has been outward: the old city holds only a small fraction of the population, while new housing societies spread east and south across former farmland towards the border and the motorway.

The economy is broad rather than dominated by one industry. Lahore has the province's government and courts, its main universities and hospitals, a large textile and light-engineering sector, publishing and film, and a growing software and services industry that employs many of the city's graduates. Bazaar trade still supports huge numbers of families, and informal work is common.

The day starts early, with breakfast eaten out at weekends and offices working through to the afternoon; the food streets and markets stay busy late into the night, especially in summer, when people come out after dark. Traffic and air quality are the two complaints heard everywhere: Lahore regularly records some of the worst winter smog readings in the world, schools have been closed on the worst days, and falling groundwater and the loss of tree cover are ongoing worries. The Orange Line and Metrobus have eased some journeys, and the restoration of the walled city has improved a few of its streets, but the gap between the planned suburbs and the crowded inner city remains wide.

Lahori food is rich, meat-heavy and built around wheat bread. Breakfast is the city's speciality: halwa puri, fried bread with semolina halwa, chickpeas and a potato curry; or siri paye, a long-simmered stew of head meat and trotters eaten with naan; or nihari, a beef shank stew cooked overnight and finished with ginger, green chilli and lemon. All of it is washed down with lassi, whisked yoghurt served sweet or salted in tall glasses, or with doodh pati tea.

Dinner is grilled and fried. Karahi is cooked to order in an iron wok with tomatoes, ginger and green chillies; seekh kebabs, chicken tikka and mutton chops come off charcoal; and Lahori chargha is a whole chicken marinated, steamed and deep-fried. Fried fish in a spiced gram-flour batter is a winter street food. Vegetarian cooking is seasonal rather than incidental — daal, chana, and in winter saag, slow-cooked mustard greens with butter, eaten with makki di roti, a maize-flour flatbread.

Sweets are a trade of their own. Halwa, barfi, gulab jamun and jalebi come from the mithai shops of the old city; kulfi, a dense frozen milk sweet, and falooda, layered with vermicelli and rose syrup, cool the summer evenings. The great eating grounds are Fort Road below the Badshahi Mosque, the old food street at Gawalmandi, the lanes of Anarkali, and, for modern restaurants and cafés, the roads of Gulberg.