Where every World Cup football and surgical instrument is made — Pakistan's export capital
Sialkot is Pakistan's most remarkable industrial city and one of the world's great examples of geographic specialisation in manufacturing. This city of 600,000 produces 60–70% of the world's hand-stitched footballs (used in every FIFA World Cup since 1982), more than half the world's surgical instruments, and a significant share of its hockey sticks, tents, and leather sporting goods. The factories — mostly family-owned, operating in two or three-story buildings in the old city lanes — are the reason the city exists. The Sialkot Chamber of Commerce's dry export processing zone is more visitor…
Sialkot is one of Punjab's ancient cities — believed by tradition to be the site of Sagala, the capital of the Indo-Greek kingdom of Menander I (155–130 BCE), the Greco-Bactrian king who became a convert to Buddhism (depicted in the Milindapanha, a Pali text recording his philosophical debates with the Buddhist monk Nagasena). The city was an important military cantonment under the Sikh Empire and then the British, who valued its position near the Kashmir border. Allama Muhammad Iqbal (1877–1938), whose poetry and philosophy laid the intellectual foundation for the idea of Pakistan as a homel…