Derawar fort stands in the Cholistan desert in Bahawalpur district: a square fort with forty bastions, thirty metres high, visible for many kilometres across flat sand.
It was held by the Bhatti Rajputs and taken by the Abbasi Nawabs of Bahawalpur in the eighteenth century. The royal necropolis of the Bahawalpur family is beside it.
Cholistan is the dry bed of the Hakra, which is the same channel that runs through Indian Punjab and Haryana as the Ghaggar. Hundreds of settlement mounds line it, from the Harappan period and earlier.
The Cholistan Desert Jeep Rally is held there annually and is the largest motorsport event in Pakistan, which is what a Harappan archaeological landscape is currently used for.
The nomadic Cholistani pastoralists move with cattle and camels between water points called tobas, which is the same word that gives Toba Tek Singh its name.
The archaeological survey of Cholistan identified hundreds of sites and very few have been excavated.
It is mud brick and mud brick has to be maintained. Whole bastions have come away on one side and the shell has been patched with material that does not match, which is what happens to a building of that size when nobody holds a budget for it.
The Abbasi family still owns it and the state does not, which is why it has been neither conserved as a monument nor developed as anything else, and why a visitor's access to it depends on who is at the gate that day.
Bahawalpur was a princely state until 1955, and its Nawabs built here and at the Noor Mahal and the Gulzar Mahal in the city and endowed a library and a college. That state's architecture is the best in southern Punjab and it is almost never counted as Punjab's at all.