Guru Arjan Dev Ji completed the tank at Amritsar and built the Harmandir in the middle of it, with the entrances open on four sides and the floor set below the level of the surrounding ground so that a person walks down to it. He built Tarn Taran, Kartarpur in Jalandhar district, and Sri Hargobindpur, and he had the Chheharta well sunk.
In 1604 he completed the Adi Granth, compiling the hymns of the first four Gurus and his own, together with the compositions of fifteen Bhagats, Hindu and Muslim, of a range of castes including Kabir Ji a weaver, Ravidas Ji a leatherworker, Namdev Ji a calico printer and Sheikh Farid Ji a Sufi. Bhai Gurdas Ji wrote it out. It was installed in the Harmandir with Baba Buddha Ji as the first granthi. No other scripture of the period was assembled on that principle.
He composed 2,218 hymns, the largest share in the volume. The Sukhmani Sahib is his.
He was arrested on Jahangir's order in 1606 and died at Lahore. Jahangir's own memoir, the Tuzuk-i-Jahangiri, records that he ordered the Guru's property confiscated and the man put to death, and gives as the reason that too many Hindus and Muslims were following him. That entry is the earliest external documentation of any event in Sikh history.
The tradition holds that he was tortured on hot plates with sand poured over him and that his body went into the Ravi. He is the first Sikh martyr.
The daswandh was formalised under him and collected through the masands, and that is what paid for the tank, the town and the buildings. Amritsar was given a market and craftsmen were brought to settle in it, so the shrine and the trading town were built as one operation.
Chheharta, Wadali and Barth carry wells and sites associated with him, and Sri Hargobindpur on the Beas was laid out as a new town with quarters for separate trades. He was a builder before he was anything else, and the physical Punjab of the Sikh tradition is largely his work.
Guru Hargobind Sahib Ji was eleven when he succeeded. The instruction attributed to his father was to sit armed and to keep men, and the two swords, the Akal Takht and everything in the next section of this map begins in the weeks after a death in custody at Lahore.