Guru Ram Das Ji founded the settlement in 1577. The Harmandir Sahib was built under Guru Arjan Dev Ji.
In 1919 a crowd penned in the walled garden at Jallianwala Bagh was fired on without warning for about ten minutes. Entry to the site is free and unticketed, so no visitor count exists.
The Partition Museum opened in the Town Hall on 17 August 2017 and has taken more than 100,000 visitors.
The Golden Temple takes 100,000 to 125,000 visitors a day in normal conditions, which implies somewhere between 36 and 46 million a year from one site. That figure is larger than the entire reported domestic tourist total for the state in several years, which tells you the counting systems do not reconcile.
A tourism survey of Punjab covering July 2009 to June 2010 found that the Golden Temple drew 35.4 per cent of the visitors counted and Wagah 11.5 per cent. Those two, with five other destinations including Anandpur Sahib and Damdama Sahib, accounted for 85 per cent of domestic visitors, and 82.8 per cent of all visitors came from within Punjab.
The city was founded around the sarovar and grew as a trading town on the route between Delhi, Lahore and Kabul. Its katras were built by the misl sardars around that trade.
It was the largest city of the Punjab plain after Lahore, with textile, carpet and shawl industries, and 1947 cut it off from its hinterland and from the city fifty kilometres west.
It is now a border city with one enormous visitor draw and an old city that has been partly rebuilt around it. Its industry never recovered what the boundary took.