The Rechna Doab lies between the Ravi and the Chenab and holds Gujranwala, Sheikhupura, Faisalabad and Sialkot. Its central portion was the Sandal Bar, high scrub grazing land between the two rivers.
Dulla Bhatti's revolt against Akbar was in the Sandal Bar. So were the pastoral communities the bar supported before irrigation.
From 1892 the Chenab Colony was cut into it, the largest of the canal colonies, and Lyallpur was founded in 1896 as its headquarters, laid out around a clock tower with eight bazaars radiating from it in the pattern of the Union Jack.
The Rechna Doab became within thirty years one of the most productive irrigated tracts in the world, settled by peasant grantees from the Amritsar, Jalandhar, Hoshiarpur and Ludhiana districts.
Every one of those grantee families left in 1947. The doab is entirely in Pakistan.
Faisalabad is now Pakistan's third largest city and its textile centre.
It holds Lahore, Sheikhupura, Gujranwala, Hafizabad and Faisalabad, which is to say the industrial and agricultural core of Pakistani Punjab.
Sialkot at its northern end was and is the surgical instrument and sports goods town, and Gujranwala the foundry and food town. The doab holds the two most specialised manufacturing clusters in Pakistani Punjab and both of them predate the canals.
The Sandal Bar was its unirrigated interior and the canal colonies converted it within twenty years. The pastoral society that had held it survives mainly in a Lohri song and in the settlement reports.