Mangla Dam
— — a slow lake where a fast river used to be.
Not only on a wall.
“An earth-fill dam on the Jhelum River, completed in 1967 as part of the Indus Waters Treaty settlement between India and Pakistan. The reservoir stretches some 250 square kilometres against the Pir Panjal foothills. The raising project of 2009 added thirty feet to the wall and submerged the old quarter of Mirpur city under the new water line.
Mangla Dam, 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.
Mangla Dam stands on the Jhelum River in Mirpur District, Azad Jammu and Kashmir, about 100 kilometres south-east of Islamabad. The main embankment runs roughly 3,140 metres along the river and rises about 147 metres above the bedrock, which made it one of the largest earth-fill dams in the world at completion in 1967. The Water and Power Development Authority of Pakistan operates the structure. The reservoir, fed by snowmelt from the Pir Panjal and the western Himalaya, holds about 7.4 million acre-feet of water at the raised conservation level.
The Jhelum carries the western Himalayan snowmelt from the Vale of Kashmir down through the Pir Panjal foothills. At Mangla the river slows into a reservoir that stretches some 250 square kilometres against the Mirpur hills. The dam was built under the Indus Waters Treaty of 1960, which assigned the Jhelum, Chenab, and Indus to Pakistan and the three eastern rivers to India. A 30-foot raising completed in 2009 added storage and submerged the old town of Mirpur, whose residents had already been resettled once by the original project.
The original 1967 project displaced around 110,000 people from the Jhelum valley, including the old town of Mirpur. Many of those families resettled in Britain, which is why the Mirpuri community of Bradford and Birmingham today traces directly to Mangla. The 2009 raising brought a second wave of displacement and a second migration. The reservoir fluctuates with the monsoon: highest after September, lowest in May before the snow lets go, when the silhouette of submerged Old Mirpur sometimes surfaces above the water.