Dera Ghazi Khan
— — a river town that moved when the river moved.
Not only on a wall.
“A crossroads city on the west bank of the Indus, where southern Punjab folds into Balochistan and the Sulaiman Range starts to rise. The old town was swallowed by the river in the early 1900s; the present Dera Ghazi Khan was laid out about nine kilometres further west, in a grid the British surveyors set down. Date palms in the bazaars, camel-leather slippers, and long ferry crossings over the Indus.
Dera Ghazi Khan, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
Dera Ghazi Khan, called DG Khan in shorthand, sits on the west bank of the Indus River in southern Punjab, about 480 kilometres southwest of Lahore. It is one of the four "Deras," frontier towns established along the Indus in the late fifteenth century by Baloch chieftains under the Mirani dynasty; tradition gives its founding to Ghazi Khan around 1476. The old city was eroded by floods through the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; the present grid town was laid out about nine kilometres west by British surveyors after 1909.
Little of the original Mirani fortifications survives, since the old city was lost to the Indus. The present town centres on a colonial-era civil station and bazaar, with Block 1 through Block 21 laid out on a strict orthogonal grid. The shrine of Sakhi Sarwar, in the foothills about thirty-five kilometres west, draws Punjabi and Baloch pilgrims through the year and gives the district much of its religious texture. The tomb of Ghazi Khan, the founder, lies a short distance from the modern city.
The city is reached by rail on the Karachi to Peshawar main line, with a connecting branch east across the Indus to Multan, about a two-hour drive. The N-55 Indus Highway runs north to south through town. Dera Ghazi Khan Airport, about ten kilometres north, has limited domestic flights to Karachi and Islamabad. The Sulaiman Range begins twenty kilometres west; the climate is hot desert, with summer highs above 45 °C and mild dry winters. Most travel into Balochistan and the tribal districts of the south passes through here.