Sutlej
— — the easternmost of the five rivers, walking home.
Not only on a wall.
“The longest of the five rivers of the Punjab. It rises near Lake Rakshastal in Tibet, runs through Himachal Pradesh and the plains of Indian Punjab, and crosses into Pakistan near Kasur. The 1960 Indus Waters Treaty gave the eastern rivers to India, so the Pakistani Sutlej often runs thin or dry below Sulemanki, threading slowly toward the Chenab south of Bahawalpur.
Sutlej, 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.
The Sutlej is the longest and easternmost of the five rivers of the Punjab, the rivers that give the region its name. It rises in western Tibet near Lake Rakshastal at about 4,575 metres of elevation and runs roughly 1,450 kilometres before joining the Chenab at Uch Sharif in southern Punjab, Pakistan. From there the combined river flows into the Indus near Mithankot. Major Pakistani crossings include the headworks at Sulemanki, Islam, and Punjnad, each anchoring a canal system that irrigates the southern Punjab plain.
The river the Sutlej is today is largely the river the 1960 Indus Waters Treaty made. Under the treaty, brokered by the World Bank between India and Pakistan, the waters of the Ravi, Beas, and Sutlej were allocated to India, with Pakistan receiving the Indus, Jhelum, and Chenab. Indian dams at Bhakra and Nangal upstream now hold most of the natural flow. Below Sulemanki headworks in Pakistan, the bed often runs thin or dry outside of monsoon spills. Local farmers depend on the canal network rather than the river itself.
The Sutlej's two old seasons were the spring snowmelt off the Tibetan and Himachal headwaters and the late-summer monsoon spills into the lower plain. Both have been thinned by upstream dams. Today the heaviest flow in Pakistan comes during exceptional monsoons, when releases from Bhakra Dam combine with rain on the lower catchment; the 2023 monsoon floods spilled across the southern Punjab plain, displacing villages near Bahawalpur and Vehari. In normal years, the bed is widest and wettest from late July through early September.