Mianwali sits on the Indus at the western edge of Punjab, where the province meets Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, and its speech and culture are as much frontier as Punjabi.
The Thal, the desert between the Indus and the Jhelum in the Sindh Sagar Doab, was opened to irrigation by the Thal canal off the Kalabagh barrage. The British Punjab government began the work in 1939 and it was roughly a third finished by 1947; Pakistan's Thal Development Authority completed it in the 1950s. It is the last of the great Punjab colonisation projects and the only one finished after independence.
Kalabagh, in the district, is the site of a proposed dam on the Indus that has been argued about since the 1980s and has not been built, because Sindh and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa oppose it. It is Pakistan's equivalent of the SYL canal: a water project that has become a constitutional argument.
The Chashma barrage is in the district.
Mianwali is a heavy recruiting district for the Pakistan Army and produced a Prime Minister of Pakistan.
Punjab's western edge is a different landscape and a different society from the canal-fed centre, and both Punjabs' accounts of themselves are written from the centre.
Mianwali sits on the Indus at the edge of the Thal, and the district is the driest and the least irrigated of the Punjab districts until the Thal Canal reached part of it.
It is the recruiting country for the army in the same way the Pothohar is, and its remittance economy runs on service pay and on Gulf work.
Its speech is on the boundary between Punjabi and Saraiki and its classification changes depending on who is doing the classifying and why.