Lyallpur was founded in 1896 as the headquarters of the Chenab Colony and laid out around a clock tower with eight bazaars radiating from it, a plan often described as following the Union Jack.
It was named after Sir James Lyall and renamed Faisalabad in 1979 after King Faisal of Saudi Arabia.
It is now Pakistan's third largest city and its textile centre, with a manufacturing economy comparable in structure to Ludhiana's: many small units, an informal workforce, and effluent problems.
The Punjab Agricultural College at Lyallpur, founded 1906, is now the University of Agriculture Faisalabad and is the counterpart of Punjab Agricultural University at Ludhiana. Both descend from the same institution.
Bhagat Singh was born in this district, at Banga in Jaranwala tehsil, in 1907.
A city built from nothing on canal water in the 1890s by families from Jalandhar and Amritsar is now one of the largest in Pakistan, and the families are all on the other side.
Its textile workforce is largely migrant, from southern Punjab and Sindh, working power looms in the same relationship Ludhiana's units have with labour from Bihar. The two cities have the same industrial structure on opposite sides of a line.
It is Pakistan's textile centre and its third largest city, built on the Chenab Colony's cotton and on the labour that came with the canal settlement.
Its agricultural university descends from the Punjab Agricultural College founded in 1906, which is the same institution Ludhiana's descends from. The two universities are the two halves of one college.