Rahim Yar Khan
— — a city that opens onto the sand.
Not only on a wall.
“A district capital in the south of Pakistan's Punjab, set between the Indus floodplain and the long red dunes of Cholistan. Cotton and sugar move through the market; the night train from Karachi pulls in on the main line. East of town the Bhong Mosque shows its mirror-work and gold; west of town the Sheikh Zayed grounds keep their long avenues. The desert begins at the city's edge and does not stop.
Rahim Yar 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.
Rahim Yar Khan is the capital of its eponymous district in the south of Punjab, Pakistan, on the main Karachi-Lahore railway line and the N-5 national highway. The city sits on the alluvial plain between the Indus to the west and the Cholistan Desert to the south and east, at the historic boundary of the former princely state of Bahawalpur. Founded under Nawab Sadiq Mohammad Khan II in the early nineteenth century, it now anchors a regional economy built on cotton, sugar cane, and the long cross-border trade with Sindh.
Forty kilometres south-west of the city, the Bhong Mosque carries the area's most photographed architecture: a syncretic composition of Mughal, Persian, and Rajasthani detail completed in 1982 after nearly fifty years of work, and awarded the Aga Khan Award for Architecture that year. Closer to town, the Sheikh Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan complex — built by the late ruler of Abu Dhabi as a winter residence and now partly used as a public garden — keeps a quieter, formal grandeur of long avenues, palms, and white pavilions on the desert margin.
The climate is hot desert: long summers above 40°C, brief sharp winters when night temperatures fall close to freezing on the Cholistan side. The light in winter is the city's best — low, level, the colour of straw across the courtyards. Dust storms come off the dunes in May and June. The Indus, twenty kilometres west, cools the river towns; the desert wind out of Cholistan carries the smell of camel grass and woodsmoke into the southern wards of the city by evening.