Pakistan

The Indus Valley Civilisation, with planned cities such as Mohenjo-daro and Harappa, flourished here more than four thousand years ago, one of the world's first urban cultures. Later came the Buddhist Gandhara civilisation and its Greco-Buddhist art around Taxila, then a long succession of empires — Persian, Greek, Mauryan, Kushan — before Islam arrived, first with the Arab conquest of Sindh in 711 and then with the Ghaznavids, the Delhi Sultanate, and the Mughals, whose monuments crown Lahore. The British annexed Punjab from the Sikh Empire in 1849, completing their control of the region.

The Pakistan Movement — the Muslim League, Muhammad Ali Jinnah, and the demand for a separate Muslim homeland — culminated in the 1947 Partition of British India, which created Pakistan in two wings separated by 1,600 kilometres of India and triggered one of history's largest and most violent mass migrations, with up to a million people killed. The eastern wing seceded in 1971, after a military crackdown and an Indian intervention, to become Bangladesh.

Since then, military coups and army rule have alternated with civilian governments that the military has repeatedly undermined. The anti-Soviet jihad of the 1980s left weapons and militancy behind; Pakistan tested nuclear weapons in 1998; and Benazir Bhutto, twice prime minister, was assassinated in 2007. After 2001, Pakistan was a US ally that also sheltered the Afghan Taliban leadership, and a domestic Taliban insurgency killed tens of thousands. More recently, the cricketer turned politician Imran Khan rose with army backing, was ousted in 2022 and jailed, and army-managed politics and a grinding economic crisis have followed.

Pakistan is bound together by Islam and by Urdu, but it is a patchwork of strong regional cultures — Punjabi, Sindhi, Pashtun, Baloch, Muhajir, and the peoples of the north — each with its own language, dress, food, and music. Sufism runs deep: shrines of saints across the country draw huge crowds to urs festivals and to the ecstatic devotional singing of qawwali, carried to the world by Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan.

The shalwar kameez is near-universal national dress, and hospitality toward guests — especially in Pashtun and Baloch codes of honour — is a point of pride, as are family and clan ties. Poetry is a mass passion, from the national poet Iqbal to Faiz Ahmed Faiz and the mushaira recital.

Cricket is the national obsession, and the country produces world-class players. Trucks turned into rolling folk-art canvases of poetry and colour are a distinctive popular art, and a lively drama and music scene runs from the Lahore film industry to Coke Studio.

Pakistan is young and rapidly urbanising. Karachi, the sprawling port megacity of Sindh, is the commercial hub; Lahore is the cultural heart of Punjab; and Islamabad is the planned capital beside the garrison city of Rawalpindi. Punjab holds around half the population and dominates politics, the army, and the economy; Sindh has Karachi and a feudal rural interior; Khyber Pakhtunkhwa borders Afghanistan; and vast, arid Balochistan is resource-rich, thinly peopled, and restive.

The economy lurches from one balance-of-payments crisis and IMF programme to the next, with high inflation, energy shortages, very low tax collection, and more than 25 million children out of school, offset by a large farming base, a big textiles export sector, IT growth, and remittances of some 30 billion dollars a year from around 10 million Pakistanis working abroad.

Climate change bears down hard: a record heatwave and the 2022 floods, which put a third of the country under water and affected 33 million people, are a warning of what a warming, water-stressed future holds.

Pakistani cooking is rich, meat-forward, and heavily spiced, sharing much with north Indian Mughlai food but with its own regional traditions. Punjab and the cities give the best-known dishes: slow-cooked nihari eaten for breakfast, haleem, karahi fried with tomato and green chilli, and tandoori and seekh kebabs with biryani, daal, and hot naan.

Chapli kebab and slow-cooked lamb are Pashtun specialities; Sindhi food is fierier, with its own biryani and Indus palla fish; and Balochi sajji is a whole lamb or chicken roasted slowly by an open fire. Street food runs from gol gappay and dahi bhalla to samosas, pakoras, and bun kebab.

Sweets such as gulab jamun, jalebi, and ras malai, and drinks of lassi, sugarcane juice, and endless milky, cardamom-spiced chai complete the picture. In Hunza and Gilgit-Baltistan the food is plainer — apricots and their oil, mulberries, buckwheat, walnut, and dumplings such as mamtu and chapshuro.

The mountainous north is the heartland of Pakistan's growing tourism. Gilgit- Baltistan holds the Hunza valley, with its stone villages, apricot blossom, and old forts above Attabad Lake; Skardu and the Baltoro glacier trek to K2 base camp and Concordia, where four 8,000-metre peaks stand in view; the meadows of Fairy Meadows below Nanga Parbat; the high plateau of Deosai; and the Khunjerab Pass on the Karakoram Highway at the Chinese border. Chitral and the isolated Kalash valleys shelter the small non-Muslim Kalasha people.

In Punjab, Lahore is the Mughal showpiece — the Fort and Badshahi Mosque, the Shalimar Gardens, the tiled Wazir Khan Mosque, and the theatrical flag ceremony at the Wagah border. Taxila's Buddhist ruins lie near Islamabad and its vast Faisal Mosque.

In Sindh, Mohenjo-daro speaks for the Indus Civilisation, and Thatta's Makli necropolis and Shah Jahan Mosque are World Heritage sites, along with the Sufi shrine city of Sehwan Sharif. Multan, "the city of saints", is a dense cluster of Sufi tombs, and the Karakoram Highway itself is one of the world's great road journeys.