The road from the Gangetic plain to the Khyber existed before anybody named it. The Mauryans maintained it. Sher Shah Suri rebuilt it with serais and trees in the 1540s. The British metalled it and called it the Grand Trunk Road. Kipling called it a river of life.
Its Punjab stretch runs Ambala, Rajpura, Sirhind, Khanna, Ludhiana, Phillaur, Jalandhar, Amritsar, Attari, and then across the line to Lahore, Gujranwala, Wazirabad, Jhelum, Rawalpindi, Attock.
Everything on this site that involves an army, a Guru, a caravan, a refugee column or a truck happened on or beside it.
In 1947 the road carried the columns in both directions and a good deal of the killing was done on it.
It is now National Highway 44 on the Indian side. The serais are ruins, the trees are being cut for widening, and the road still does what it has always done, which is to carry everything that crosses northern India.
It is a single continuous piece of infrastructure with two and a half thousand years of use and there is no museum anywhere along it about the road itself.
The road is older than Sher Shah, who rebuilt and provisioned it, and older than the Mughals, who extended the serais and the kos minars along it.
Its Punjab stretch carries the province's cities in a line, and every invasion, every army and most of the trade of two thousand years has moved along it.
It is now a six lane highway with the same alignment. The serais, the minars and the old trees are beside it, and the drivers passing at a hundred kilometres an hour do not see any of it.