Lahore, Islamabad & Punjab

Harappa, on an old course of the Ravi near Sahiwal, gave its name to the Indus Valley Civilisation, whose cities flourished here from around 2600 BC. Later, Taxila became the great city of Gandhara, visited by Alexander the Great in 326 BC and ruled in turn by Mauryans, Indo-Greeks and Kushans, whose Buddhist monasteries made it a centre of learning. Multan, one of the oldest continuously inhabited cities in South Asia, fell to the Arab conqueror Muhammad bin Qasim in the early 8th century and later became a stronghold of Sufi mystics.

Lahore rose under the Ghaznavids in the 11th century, when the Sufi scholar Ali Hujwiri, now revered as Data Ganj Bakhsh, settled there. The Mughals made it one of their capitals: Akbar held court in Lahore in the late 16th century, Jahangir was buried across the Ravi at Shahdara, Shah Jahan laid out the Shalimar Gardens and Aurangzeb built the Badshahi Mosque. In 1799 Ranjit Singh took the city and made it the capital of the Sikh Empire, which the British annexed in 1849 after two wars.

At a session in Lahore in 1940 the Muslim League passed the resolution demanding a Muslim homeland, and Minar-e-Pakistan marks the spot. Partition in 1947 cut Punjab in two; Hindus and Sikhs fled east and Muslims fled west amid massacres. Rawalpindi, headquarters of the army, served as a temporary capital while Islamabad was built beneath the Margalla Hills in the 1960s to a plan by the Greek architect Constantinos Doxiadis. Rawalpindi has also been the scene of national tragedies: Prime Minister Liaquat Ali Khan was assassinated in what is now Liaquat Bagh in 1951, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto was hanged there in 1979, and his daughter Benazir was killed after a rally in the same park in 2007.

Punjabi is the mother tongue of most people here, spoken in several dialects, including Majhi around Lahore and Potohari around Rawalpindi, while Saraiki dominates the south around Multan and Bahawalpur, where a distinct regional identity has fuelled calls for a separate province. Urdu and English are the languages of offices and schools, and Islamabad, a city of civil servants, diplomats and migrants from across the country, is the least Punjabi place in the region.

Sufi devotion shapes the calendar. Crowds gather for qawwali on Thursday nights at Data Darbar in Lahore, for the Mela Chiraghan festival of lamps at the shrine of Madho Lal Hussain, and for the urs of the saints of Multan and Pakpattan. The poets Bulleh Shah, buried at Kasur, and Waris Shah, author of the tragic romance Heer Ranjha, are still sung and quoted. The province also holds the most sacred Sikh places in Pakistan, above all Nankana Sahib, birthplace of Guru Nanak, and Kartarpur, where a visa-free corridor from India opened in 2019.

Punjabi culture is loud and sociable: the dhol drum and bhangra at weddings, wrestling in the villages, kite flying on rooftops, and cricket in every street and park. Crafts include Multan's blue-glazed pottery and camel-skin lamps, phulkari embroidery, and the sports goods of Sialkot, whose factories stitch footballs for the world.

Punjab has well over 120 million people, more than half the country's population, and Islamabad Capital Territory has about 2.4 million more. Lahore, with about 13 million, is the second city of Pakistan; Faisalabad, Rawalpindi, Gujranwala, Multan and Sialkot follow. Rawalpindi and Islamabad have grown into one metropolis split between an old bazaar city and a leafy, sectored capital.

This is Pakistan's farming and industrial core. Canals from the Indus and its tributaries water wheat, rice, cotton, sugarcane and mangoes; Faisalabad is the centre of the textile industry, Sialkot exports surgical instruments and sports goods, and Lahore has a growing IT and media sector. Politics revolves around the province, which elects most of the National Assembly.

Days start early to beat the heat, with halwa puri or nihari for breakfast on weekends, and life runs late into the night in the food streets and markets. The biggest problems are the winter smog that regularly makes Lahore one of the most polluted cities in the world, falling groundwater, inflation, traffic and the periodic floods of the Ravi, Chenab and Sutlej.

Lahore has a claim to be the food capital of Pakistan. Breakfast is halwa puri, fried bread with semolina halwa and chickpeas, or siri paye, a stew of trotters and head meat, with kulchas and a tall glass of lassi. Lahori chargha is a whole chicken marinated in spices, steamed and then deep-fried, and Lahori fish is river fish fried in a spiced gram-flour batter, eaten in winter.

Karahi cooked to order in a wok with tomatoes, ginger and green chillies, seekh kebabs, tikka and tandoori breads fill the evening food streets. Village Punjab eats saag, slow-cooked mustard greens with butter, with makki di roti, maize-flour flatbread, in winter. Sweets include kulfi, a dense frozen milk dessert, falooda, gulab jamun and Multan's sohan halwa, a hard brittle sweet made with milk, sugar and nuts. In summer, south Punjab's mangoes, such as the Chaunsa variety, are a national event.

In Lahore, the walled city holds Lahore Fort, with its Sheesh Mahal mirror palace and the long tiled Picture Wall, facing the Badshahi Mosque across the Hazuri Bagh; together with the Shalimar Gardens the fort is a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Near them are the samadhi of Ranjit Singh, the tiled Wazir Khan Mosque, and Fort Road Food Street, while Gawalmandi is the other famous food street. Jahangir's tomb at Shahdara, Minar-e-Pakistan, the Lahore Museum and the flag-lowering ceremony at the Wagah border complete the city.

Islamabad sits at the foot of the Margalla Hills National Park, whose trails lead to the Daman-e-Koh and Pir Sohawa viewpoints above the city. The Faisal Mosque, the Pakistan Monument and the Lok Virsa heritage museum are the main sights, and neighbouring Rawalpindi offers the crowded Raja Bazaar and Saddar. Beyond them lie the Murree hill station and, to the north-west, Taxila's Buddhist sites of Dharmarajika, Sirkap and Jaulian.

South of the capital, the Salt Range holds the Khewra salt mine, source of so-called Himalayan pink salt, the Katas Raj temples around a sacred pool, and the lake at Kallar Kahar, with the great Sher Shah Suri fortress of Rohtas, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, near Jhelum. Further south, Harappa's excavated mounds lie near Sahiwal, and Multan's shrines of Shah Rukn-e-Alam and Bahauddin Zakariya overlook the old city. Bahawalpur's palaces, the tombs of Uch Sharif and Derawar Fort in the Cholistan desert close the region.