Pathankot was made a district in 2011, separated from Gurdaspur. It is the smallest and northernmost district of Punjab and it is where Punjab, Himachal Pradesh and Jammu meet.
Everything going north by road or rail passes through it, which is why it holds one of the largest military stations in India and an air force base.
It holds the Madhopur headworks on the Ravi, the Ranjit Sagar dam, the start of the Kangra Valley narrow gauge railway, and the Nurpur fort in the hills just over the boundary.
Its land is Kandi, broken foothill country with chos, and its agriculture is poorer than the plain's. It has a growing tourism economy as the gateway to Dalhousie and Kangra.
What is not recorded: the district's Kandi villages, their water sources and their emigration, which have not been studied separately from Hoshiarpur's.
The district is the corridor to Jammu and Kashmir and to Himachal, and its airbase and cantonment follow from that. The airbase was attacked in January 2016.
The Ranjit Sagar dam on the Ravi, completed in 2001, is the largest hydroelectric dam in Punjab and one of the highest earth-fill dams in India, and its reservoir drowned villages on both sides of the state line.
Madhopur headworks, built in the 1870s, feeds the Upper Bari Doab Canal, which waters Gurdaspur and Amritsar and is among the oldest canal systems in the region.