Islamabad is barely 60 years old, but it sits on 2,500 years of layered history: Gandharan Buddhist monasteries at Taxila, Gakhar-clan villages on the Potohar Plateau, colonial railheads in Rawalpindi and Partition-emptied havelis still standing.
Purpose-built in 1928 beside the Bhir Mound, this colonial-era gallery holds the finest Gandhara stone Buddhas, stucco heads, silver caskets and gold jewellery pulled from Taxila's ruins by John Marshall's excavators.
The grid-planned Indo-Greek city laid out around 180 BC, then rebuilt by Scythians, Parthians and Kushans. Walk the 700m main street past the Double-Headed Eagle Shrine, the apsidal temple and the royal palace foundations.
A 2nd-century AD monastery on a hilltop ridge above the Haro valley, its main stupa ringed by stucco votive stupas and 21 monk cells still standing shoulder-high. The 'healing Buddha' has a navel hole worn smooth by petitioners.
A caravan halt on the old Kabul–Gandhara road below the Margallas, used by Buddhist monks, then Hindu sadhus, then Mughal armies marching to Kabul. Faded ochre murals survive in the rock shelters above the banyan-shaded spring.
The 1882 junction station houses North Western Railway relics: the Maharaja of Jodhpur's saloon carriage, brass signalling gear, wooden ticket presses, tokens and the crockery of the Frontier Mail. Open 09:00–16:00, closed Monday.
Built in 1881 as the Punjab Northern State Railway pushed toward Peshawar, its arcaded platforms and cast-iron columns still handle the Khyber Mail. Troop trains for the Second Afghan War and the 1947 refugee trains loaded here.
Opened in 2017 inside Ayub National Park, tracing the Pakistan Army from the 1947 Kashmir operations through the 1965 and 1971 wars to Kargil — captured armour outdoors, Nishan-e-Haider galleries and a hall on the 2005 earthquake.
The public park where Pakistan's first prime minister Liaquat Ali Khan was shot dead mid-speech on 16 October 1951, and where Benazir Bhutto was assassinated leaving a rally on 27 December 2007. Both spots are marked by memorials.
A 500-year-old Potohari village swallowed by the planned capital, named for Said Khan of the Gakhar clan. A Mughal-era garden and pond sit below the hill, and a Hindu temple and Sikh gurdwara stand side by side, restored in 2006.
The shrine of 17th-century Sufi saint Shah Abdul Latif Kazmi, whose village predates Islamabad by three centuries and refused to move for it. Green-tiled tomb, Thursday-evening qawwali and a May urs drawing hundreds of thousands.
A four-storey 1893 mansion of some 40 rooms built by Rai Bahadur Sujan Singh, abandoned at Partition in 1947 and now half-collapsed. The Hindu and Sikh quarter around it keeps carved balconies and lost family names cut into lintels.
Rawalpindi's trading core since Gakhar times, rebuilt after the British annexation of Punjab in 1849. Sarafa, Moti and Bhabra bazaars run off it, and Hindu temple spires and Gurdwara Bagh Sardaran still rise above the shopfronts.