After taking Sirhind in 1710, Baba Banda Singh Bahadur Ji established his seat at Lohgarh, a fort in the Shivalik foothills near Sadhaura, in what is now Yamunanagar district of Haryana.
This was the first territorial Sikh capital. Coin was struck there in the name of Guru Nanak Dev Ji and Guru Gobind Singh Ji. Orders were issued under a seal in the same names. A revenue administration was set up in which the land went to those who cultivated it.
Mughal forces under Bahadur Shah besieged it in December 1710. Banda Singh Bahadur Ji escaped by a device the accounts describe as a substitution, a follower dressed in his clothes holding the position while he went out through the hills.
He retook the area in 1712 after Bahadur Shah died, and was finally besieged at Gurdas Nangal in 1715.
The site at Lohgarh has been surveyed only recently and is largely unexcavated. The first capital of a Sikh state is an overgrown hill fort with no visitor road.
The coins carry a legend saying that the sword and the victory are the gift of the Gurus, and the seal names Nanak and Gobind Singh rather than the man issuing it. Striking coin is the act that declares a state, and this one declared it in somebody else's name on purpose.
The site is spread across a wide area of broken hill country and has been surveyed only recently and partially. Its scale appears to be much larger than a fort.
That the first Sikh state's capital has not been excavated, and is not protected as a single site, is among the largest archaeological gaps in northern India.