Islamabad is the capital city of Pakistan. The government sits there. It is not the biggest city — that is Karachi — and it is not the old cultural heart in the same way Lahore is. Islamabad was built on purpose in the 1960s as a new capital, in the north of the country, near the older city of Rawalpindi. The name comes from Urdu and means a settled place of Islam: Islam + -abad, a Persian ending used in many South Asian city names for “city” or “inhabited place.” It is an ordinary place name: you write it with a capital I, like Taipei or London. Though actually, English speakers sometimes mix it with Istanbul, the big city in Turkey, because both start with I and both turn up on the same school-map pages. They are in different countries, with different Chinese names too.