Guru Arjan, the fifth guru, compiled the Adi Granth in 1604, gathering the compositions of his predecessors together with those of Hindu and Muslim devotional poets, and installed it at Amritsar. Two years later he was summoned to Lahore by the emperor Jahangir, held in custody, and died. Jahangir's own memoir records that he ordered the guru's execution and the confiscation of his property; Sikh tradition adds the details of torture by heat and of his final bathing in the river Ravi. His death is generally treated as the point at which the Sikh community began to arm itself, and the sixth guru took up two swords for temporal and spiritual authority.
Gurdwara Dera Sahib stands at the place beside the Lahore fort. A few steps away is the samadhi of Ranjit Singh, who made Lahore the capital of a Sikh state that ruled the Punjab from 1799 until the British annexation of 1849, and who paid for the gilding that gives the Golden Temple its name.
Partition in 1947 put the city in Pakistan, and its Sikh and Hindu populations left in the violence of that year. The gurdwaras are maintained by a state property board, and pilgrim parties travel from India on fixed anniversaries under a visa arrangement between the two governments, so a community's access to its own foundational sites depends on the state of relations between two countries.