Jhang
— — the town the old song still sings about.
Not only on a wall.
“A city of around 400,000 on the east bank of the Chenab in Pakistani Punjab. Best known as the home of Heer, the heroine of Heer Ranjha, the Punjabi love story Waris Shah set into verse in 1766. Her shrine at Jhang Sial draws pilgrims each summer for an annual urs. Cotton, wheat, and rice fields run flat to the river. The Chenab flows on toward Trimmu, where it meets the Jhelum.
Jhang, 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.
Jhang is the headquarters of Jhang District in the Punjab province of Pakistan, on the east bank of the Chenab roughly 200 kilometres south-west of Lahore. The city's population was about 414,000 at the 2017 census. The river flat is irrigated farmland fed by the canals of the Lower Chenab system, opened under British administration in 1892, which made this stretch of the Punjab some of the most productive land in South Asia. Downstream the Chenab joins the Jhelum at Trimmu Headworks.
Jhang is bound to the Punjabi love story of Heer and Ranjha. Heer Sial was the daughter of a chieftain of the Sial clan, who founded the town in the fifteenth century. The story has older roots, but the version that travelled was the one Waris Shah composed in 1766 in 629 stanzas of musaddas. Heer's qissa is recited in courtyards across Punjab on both sides of the border. The urs at her shrine falls every year on the dates set by the lunar calendar.
The shrine to Heer at Jhang Sial, on the western edge of the old town, is the place most outside visitors come for. The structure is small, tiled in cobalt and white, and stands beside the older grave platform of Mai Heer. It is open daily without an entry fee; the busiest days are the three of the annual urs, when qawwals sing through the night. The Sultan Bahu shrine at Garh Maharaja, eighty kilometres south-west, sits on the same Sufi pilgrimage route.