1 · POSITION
The Grand Trunk Road runs about 3,655 kilometres from Bangladesh across India and Pakistan to Kabul, and it is older than its British name. It follows the ancient Uttarapatha, the northern road from the mouth of the Ganges to the northwest frontier. The register enters it for the sarais, wells and shade that rulers built along it for the people who walked it. [1]
2 · THE MAURYAN ROAD
Its precursor was built on the orders of Chandragupta Maurya, on the model of the Persian Royal Road. Ashoka’s edicts speak of planting trees, digging wells at every half kos and providing rest-houses for travellers along it — hospitality written into an emperor’s inscriptions in the third century BC. The Greek envoy Megasthenes, fifteen years at the Mauryan court, reported a whole army of officials keeping the road in repair. [1, 2]
3 · SHER SHAH AND THE MUGHALS
In the sixteenth century Sher Shah Suri repaired, widened and rerouted it, and built caravanserais — one account says a sarai every two kilometres — stepwells and kos minars, the distance markers that told a traveller how far the next sarai lay. Jahangir ordered sarais of burnt brick and stone, trees planted between Lahore and Agra, and bridges over its rivers. [1, 2]
4 · THE BRITISH NAME
From the 1830s the East India Company built metalled roads, and the road from Calcutta through Delhi to Kabul became the Grand Trunk Road — the Long Walk, to the British. Kipling called it in Kim such a river of life as nowhere else exists in the world, which is the reason a register of hospitality holds a road. [1]
5 · ⚑ CANDOUR
⚑ Checked on 22 October 2026. The register’s figure of up to 1,700 sarais built by Sher Shah is the figure tradition gives — one every two kos, with separate lodgings for Hindus and Muslims, and stages of the dak-chowki post — and the note now says so. The order of Akbar that a sarai feed anyone who could not pay was not found: the Lahore sarai that carries his name was begun under Islam Shah Suri, and there fodder, water and bedsteads were free, with a physician and a baker. The note now says that instead. The road’s length is given as 3,655, about 2,600 and about 2,400 kilometres by different accounts; the differences are in where it is counted from. [1–6]
Sources & Further Reading
Sources checked 22 October 2026.