Phillaur stands on the north bank of the Sutlej opposite Ludhiana. After the Treaty of Amritsar in 1809 fixed the Sutlej as the boundary between Ranjit Singh Ji's state and the Company, the two powers faced each other across the river at this point. The Company had a cantonment at Ludhiana. Ranjit Singh Ji had a fort built at Phillaur to look at it.
The work was done under his French officers in the 1810s, on the plan of a European bastioned fort rather than a Mughal one, and it is one of the clearest surviving pieces of evidence for what Allard, Ventura and Court actually changed in the Sikh state.
The Company took it in 1846 and used it as a base. It is now the Punjab Police Academy, and recruits have been trained inside those walls since 1891. The state fingerprint bureau and forensic laboratory are on the same site.
A Mughal serai stands beside the fort on the Grand Trunk Road, of the same family as Doraha and Dakhni Sarai.
The bridge at Phillaur, opened in 1870, was the first rail crossing of the Sutlej and it carried the line that tied Delhi to Lahore.
Before any bridge there was a ferry here and a bridge of boats in the dry months, and traffic on the Grand Trunk Road waited on the bank for it. The fort was put above the crossing because the crossing was the thing worth holding, which is the reason forts go where they go.
It was designed with European advice and is one of the few Sikh period military works still standing complete, because the police have used it since 1891.
The Mughal serai a few hundred metres away has no second use and is in the condition that follows from that. Two buildings on the same road, one kept up out of a police budget and the other by nobody, and the difference between them has nothing to do with which is older or finer.