Bhera on the Jhelum is one of the oldest towns in Punjab. Some early scholars placed the capital of a kingdom Alexander encountered at old Bhera, though the identification is doubtful. The town was sacked by Mahmud of Ghazni and taken by Babur in 1519 on his first Indian expedition, which he describes in the Baburnama.
It has a walled core with gates and a large amount of surviving pre-modern fabric: havelis with carved woodwork and brick facades, mosques, temples and gurdwaras.
It was a wealthy trading town with a substantial Hindu and Sikh commercial population before 1947 and it has been described as one of the best-preserved traditional urban centres in Pakistani Punjab, largely because it stopped growing.
Its havelis are deteriorating and there has been intermittent conservation interest.
Bhera is what a Punjabi trading town looked like before the twentieth century, and the reason it survives is that its merchants left and nobody replaced them.
The plan is a walled rectangle with named gates and a grid of lanes, and it survived because Bhera was bypassed by the railway and by the canal colonies and never had a reason to expand.
The havelis carry carved wooden balconies, brick jharokhas and painted interiors. Ownership passed in 1947 to families who had come from the other side and had no connection to the buildings they were given.
Bhera stands in Sargodha district on the old road toward Multan. Guru Nanak Sahib Ji is recorded as having visited and a gurdwara stood in the town.