Rawalpindi
— — the old city beside the new capital.
Not only on a wall.
“An old garrison and bazaar city on the Pothohar plateau, paired since the 1960s with the planned capital next door. Raja Bazaar still runs the way it has for generations: narrow lanes off Bhabra, copper and cloth and the smell of cardamom. The British made it the headquarters of the Northern Command in 1851 and the cantonment plan still shows in the wide tree-lined avenues south of the Mall. Saddar fills at dusk. The Margalla foothills sit on the horizon to the north, holding the city against the new one.
Rawalpindi, 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.
Rawalpindi is a city of roughly 2.3 million on the Pothohar plateau in northern Punjab, about 14 kilometres south of Islamabad. The two cities together form one of Pakistan's largest urban regions, served by Islamabad International Airport at Fateh Jang. Rawalpindi sits at 508 metres elevation, ringed to the north by the Margalla Hills and drained by the Soan River. It is the headquarters of the Pakistan Army's General Headquarters and remains the country's principal garrison city, a role it has held continuously since 1851.
The bazaar district is the old heart. Raja Bazaar, Bhabra Bazaar, Sarafa Bazaar, and Moti Bazaar interlock along narrow lanes north of the Mall, each historically specialised: gold and silver at Sarafa, cloth at Bhabra, copper and brass at the western end. Many shopfronts are Sikh-era or early-British, with carved wooden balconies and shuttered jharokhas above ground-floor stalls. The cantonment to the south, laid out after the British arrived in 1849, is the geometric opposite: wide tree-lined avenues, churches, and the long axis of the Mall.
Rawalpindi has been a continuous settlement since at least the Buddhist period; ruins from the Gandhara civilisation at nearby Taxila date to the third century BCE. The Ghakkar clan held the area through the late medieval period, and the Sikh Empire took it in 1765. The British made Rawalpindi the headquarters of the Northern Command in 1851 and built the cantonment that still defines the southern half of the city. From 1959 to 1969 it served as Pakistan's interim capital while Islamabad was being built on the next plateau.