Mandi Bahauddin
— — a market town the two rivers hold.
Not only on a wall.
“A Punjabi market town set on the doab between the Jhelum and the Chenab, in the alluvial heart of Pakistan's wheat and rice country. Founded in the early sixteenth century and named for a Gondal chief, it grew through the colonial irrigation works of the Lower Jhelum Canal. The grain market still sets the rhythm of the week. The two rivers, wide and slow, mark the district on either side.
Mandi Bahauddin, 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.
Mandi Bahauddin is the headquarters of Mandi Bahauddin District in the Pakistani province of Punjab, sitting on the Chaj Doab — the alluvial plain between the Jhelum River to the north and the Chenab River to the south. The town takes its name from Bahauddin, a sixteenth-century Gondal chief, with mandi marking it as a regulated grain market. The district covers roughly 2,673 square kilometres and the town itself sits at about 232 metres above sea level, roughly 220 kilometres northwest of Lahore.
The district is shaped by two rivers and the canal system that draws from them. The Jhelum forms the northern boundary; the Chenab forms the southern. The Lower Jhelum Canal, opened in 1901 under the colonial irrigation works, made the doab arable and underwrote the town's growth as a grain market. Rasul Barrage on the Jhelum, about thirty kilometres north of the town, regulates the canal's headworks and supplies water across the cropland for wheat, rice, sugarcane, and citrus orchards.
The agricultural calendar runs the town. The rabi wheat harvest peaks in April and May; the kharif rice and sugarcane crops come off the fields between October and December. Grain arrivals to the regulated market follow that calendar and the bazaar swells at each turn. Summer monsoon rains arrive in July, modest by the standards of the eastern Punjab. Winter mornings on the doab carry the cold fog rolling off the Chenab through January, then lift by mid-morning.