The Ancient City Next Door to Pakistan's Capital — Islamabad's twin city where the Raja Bazaar labyrinth has sold everything from wedding jewellery to live chickens for 500 years, Taxila's 2,300-year-old Buddhist university is 30 km away, and the Murree Hills rise green and cool above the plains
Rawalpindi ('Pindi' to everyone in Pakistan) is one of Pakistan's largest cities — historically significant as a cantonment city and the fourth-oldest continuously inhabited city in the world. It sits directly adjacent to Islamabad (the planned capital built from scratch in the 1960s) and the two function as a twin city: Islamabad has the government ministries, embassies, and manicured boulevards; Rawalpindi has the history, the bazaars, the working-class neighbourhoods, and the chaos. The Raja Bazaar in Rawalpindi's old city is one of the largest traditional bazaars in South Asia — a dense l…
Rawalpindi's site has been inhabited continuously since at least the Neolithic period — the nearby Taxila archaeological site (30 km north) shows continuous occupation from c. 1000 BCE through the 5th century CE, when the White Hun invasions destroyed it. Rawalpindi itself ('Rawalpindi' derives from the Rawals, a community of followers of Sikh saint Rawa) was a significant Sikh-era city before the British East India Company seized the Punjab after the Second Anglo-Sikh War (1849). The British established Rawalpindi as the main military cantonment for the northwestern frontier and the garrison…