Lahore's culture runs far past the Mughals. In three days you move from Jahangir's inlaid mausoleum to Shakir Ali's modernist studio, the miniature ateliers of the National College of Arts, Nayyar Ali Dada's brick theatre, and the dhol at Shah Jamal.
Jahangir's 1637 mausoleum sits in a walled charbagh with four 30m minarets and pietra dura inlay of jasper and marble across the cenotaph. Open 8:30–17:00 daily; the adjoining Akbari Serai and Asif Khan tomb share the ticket.
Pakistan's oldest art school, founded 1875 as the Mayo School of Arts under Rudyard Kipling's father. The gallery on the Mall Road campus shows degree work and contemporary miniature painting; the archives hold Chughtai originals.
The house Shakir Ali designed and lived in until 1975, now a state museum. The modernist painter's studio, palette and cubist-influenced canvases stay as he left them, and the concrete stair and courtyard are as much the exhibit as the work.
The 1646 gateway to a vanished Mughal garden attributed to Zebunnisa: four tapering minarets sheathed in cut brick and blue kashi tilework, now marooned on a traffic island on Multan Road. The fluted domes were rebuilt after the 1846 earthquake.
The 1894 Wonder House of Kipling's Kim, twenty galleries holding the Gandharan Fasting Buddha, Mughal miniatures, Sikh-era coinage and Company School painting. Open 09:00–17:00, with a break on Fridays for afternoon prayers.
The Mall Road cafe where the Progressive Writers' Movement met — Faiz Ahmed Faiz, Saadat Hasan Manto and Intizar Hussain argued at these tables. Closed in 1999, reopened by the Punjab government in 2013, and literary sittings still run weekly.
Nayyar Ali Dada's red-brick complex on the Mall: three angled halls that took the Aga Khan Award for Architecture in 1998. Punjabi and Urdu theatre most evenings, plus the Alhamra Art Gallery's rotating shows of Lahore painters.
Thursday nights at the shrine of Shah Jamal, dhol players in Pappu Sain's lineage drum from around 22:00 until dawn while dhamaal dancers spin in the courtyard. Come at dusk to claim floor space before the terraces fill.
Shah Jahan's 1642 terraced garden on three descending levels, fed by the Shah Nahar canal and once running 410 fountains. UNESCO-listed alongside the fort; the marble Sawan Bhadon pavilion sits behind a curtain of falling water.
Three floors holding the city's deepest English-language Pakistani fiction and translated Punjabi poetry, plus imported art and architecture titles. The ground-floor cafe hosts author sittings most months.
The Rafi Peer Theatre Workshop's home: a mud-and-brick courtyard with a puppet museum of 300-plus marionettes from the World Puppet Festival, and folk-music sittings under the trees on Thursday and Sunday afternoons.
Lawrence Gardens, laid out in 1860 around a Victorian-Gothic pavilion that now houses the Quaid-e-Azam Library and its 125,000 volumes. Open-air Punjabi music and mushaira sittings run on the lawns most weekend evenings.