Dakhni Sarai stands near Nakodar in Jalandhar district, on the road to Kapurthala. It is a walled Mughal caravanserai with a courtyard and a hundred and twenty-four cells around it, attributed to Nur Jahan and dated to the reign of Jahangir, though some accounts credit Ali Mardan Khan and the year 1640.
Serais were built roughly a day's march apart along the imperial road, which ran from Bengal to Kabul. A traveller, a merchant with pack animals, a runner carrying post, all stopped at the same walls. The cells were let, the gate was shut at dusk, and the courtyard held the animals. The system was maintained by the state and paid for out of the land revenue of villages assigned to it.
Doraha Sarai, a few kilometres away, is the better preserved of the pair and has the more decorated gateway. Both are protected monuments and both have had families living in the cells at various points.
The serais are the reason the Grand Trunk Road can be traced through Punjab even where the modern highway has moved off the old alignment. They are among the least visited historic buildings in the state and several have been quarried for brick.
The serai has a hundred and twenty-four cells around a courtyard with two gateways, and it is one of the more complete Mughal serai plans surviving anywhere in the region.
Its cells were built for travellers and their animals, and the arrangement is standard: a room, a platform, and a place for the horse at the door.
It stands on the old road, unstaffed and unlit, and the number of people who visit it in a year is probably smaller than the number of cells.