Current Time in Mardan, Pakistan

Mardan lies in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province in northwestern Pakistan, in a broad and fertile valley watered by the Kalpani stream and ringed by dry brown hills. Peshawar is about fifty kilometres to the southwest, and the road north leads toward the Malakand Pass and the Swat valley. The climate is hot in summer, cool and occasionally frosty in winter, with most rain falling in spring and during the monsoon.

With a population of well over three hundred and fifty thousand, Mardan is the second largest city in the province. The surrounding district is one of the most productive agricultural areas of the region, famous for sugarcane, wheat, maize and tobacco, and the sugar mill established here in the 1930s was among the first large industrial enterprises in the province.

The valley has an extraordinarily deep history. This was the heartland of ancient Gandhara, a civilisation that flourished for centuries at the meeting point of Indian, Persian, Greek and Central Asian influences and produced a Buddhist art of remarkable beauty. The most celebrated site is Takht-i-Bahi, a monastery complex spread across a rocky spur about fifteen kilometres from the city, whose courtyards, stupa bases, monks' cells and assembly halls are among the best preserved Buddhist remains in South Asia and are protected as a World Heritage site. The nearby mound of Sahr-i-Bahlol, a walled town of the same period, forms part of the listing. Jamal Garhi holds another monastery, while at Shahbaz Garhi two great boulders carry edicts of the emperor Ashoka carved in Kharoshthi script in the third century before the common era, among the oldest written documents in the subcontinent.

In more recent times the town was known as Hoti Mardan and became a British military station, home to the Corps of Guides, a famous frontier regiment founded in the 1840s whose cantonment, church and cemetery still stand. The region is the homeland of the Yusufzai Pashtuns, whose codes of hospitality and honour shape social life, and Pashto is the everyday language.

Visitors come mainly for the archaeology, but the city has its own character, with crowded bazaars selling embroidered caps, chappal sandals and dried fruit, tea houses serving green tea in the Pashtun manner and a cuisine built around charsi tikka, lamb karahi, rice pulao and thick naan baked in clay ovens. The surrounding countryside, green with sugarcane in summer and framed by mountains, is genuinely beautiful, and the valleys of Swat and Buner lie within easy reach.

Abdul Wali Khan University Mardan is a large public institution with several campuses, joined by medical, engineering and technical colleges that draw students from across the province. Roads link the city to Peshawar, Islamabad and Swat, and the motorway network has shortened journeys considerably.

Mardan is significant as a centre of Gandharan heritage, an agricultural hub and a gateway to the mountains of northern Pakistan.