Guru Nanak Dev Ji was born in 1469 at Rai Bhoi di Talwandi, in what is now Nankana Sahib district in Pakistan's Punjab, about 75 kilometres south-west of Lahore.
The town takes its present name from him. Gurdwara Janam Asthan stands on the site of the house.
It has been on the far side of the border since 1947. Access runs on visa arrangements that open and close with the state of relations between the two countries.
The town was Rai Bhoi di Talwandi, held by a Muslim Bhatti landholding family, and Rai Bular, the local chief, appears throughout the janamsakhi accounts as an early recogniser of the Guru. The family's descendants held land here into the twentieth century and the connection is remembered on both sides.
Nankana Sahib is the site of the massacre of 20 February 1921, when about a hundred and fifty Akali reformers entering the shrine were shot and cut down by the mahant's hired men and the bodies burned. That is the event that turned the Gurdwara Reform Movement into a mass campaign, and it happened at the birthplace.
Indian pilgrims reach it four times a year under the 1974 shrine protocol, in jathas with agreed numbers. Demand exceeds the allocation by a wide margin every year. The town is otherwise an ordinary district headquarters in Pakistani Punjab.