Ludhiana came under British control in 1809 and became a frontier post on the Sutlej, facing the Sikh state across the river after the Treaty of Amritsar fixed the boundary that year.
It is now Punjab's largest city and its industrial centre. The Ministry of Tourism's survey found the Hosiery Market drew 8.9 per cent of all visitors to Punjab, third behind the Golden Temple and Wagah, which says something about what people actually come for.
Ludhiana was a Company cantonment from 1809, facing Ranjit Singh Ji's fort at Phillaur across the Sutlej, and it was the base from which the First Anglo-Sikh War was fought in the winter of 1845.
The American Presbyterian mission established a press here in 1835 and it became the centre of Gurmukhi printing in Punjab, turning out scripture, grammars, primers and tracts. The first Gurmukhi movable type had been cut earlier at Serampore in Bengal, where a Punjabi Bible was printed in 1811, and the Ludhiana press worked with imported Serampore type before cutting its own.
It is now the largest city in Punjab, running on knitwear, bicycles and machine tools made in thousands of small units by a largely migrant workforce, with Punjab Agricultural University on one side of it and the Buddha Nullah running through the middle.
The district was also where exiles and pensioners were kept. Shah Shuja of Kabul was lodged here, and a succession of deposed chiefs after him. A frontier station is also a place to put the people you can neither release nor send home, and the political agency's budget for them ran for forty years.
The mission press, the medical school and the cantonment all followed from that position, and the city's institutional history begins as a border post.
After 1947 it took a very large refugee population with trade skills and became the industrial city it now is, on private capital and almost no state planning.