Headquarters Alpuri · cut from Swat in 1995 · 891,252 people in 2023 · Besham on the Karakoram Highway
Shangla is the hill district on the east wall of Swat. Alpuri is the headquarters. Besham is the town the highway already knows. Puran, Chakesar and Martung are the other printed tehsils. Kohistan sits north, Battagram and Torghar east, Buner south. Until 1995 this land was a subdivision of Swat. The new district did not flatten the ridges. It gave Alpuri a deputy commissioner and left the road to Besham as the cash route.
Pashto is the speech of most houses. Besham tehsil’s 2023 tongue row still prints thousands of Kohistani speakers beside the Pashto majority. That mix is the Indus-road side, not a mistake in the book.
Households 125,540. Population 891,252. Area 1,586 km². Literacy 33.74 percent — 48.82 percent for men, 17.82 percent for women. Under-tens about 307,000 (35 percent). Sex ratio about 107 men per 100 women. The compiled tables treat the tehsils as rural. Besham functions as a bazaar town on the KKH even when the census row does not give it a large municipal line.
October 2005 shook this belt the same week it shook Balakot. School buildings and hill roads were part of that damage. The date belongs on a Shangla page because families still use it when they talk about a collapsed classroom.
Alpuri — 582 km², 366,772 people, literacy about 38.3 percent. Headquarters tehsil. Largest count.
Puran — 297 km², 171,758 people, literacy about 35.1 percent.
Chakesar — 335 km², 128,238 people, literacy about 26.1 percent.
Besham (Bisham) — 184 km², 121,279 people, literacy about 34.8 percent. Smallest land of the five printed rows, highway town, junction toward Kohistan and the river.
Martung — 188 km², 103,205 people, literacy about 24.0 percent. Lowest literacy of the five.
Makhuzai and Shahpur appear as extra tehsil titles on some maps. They do not have a full 2023 population line in the same extract. They are named here as titles only.
Besham lives off the highway: buses, fruit trucks, workshops. Alpuri lives off offices and the ridge villages. When a slide closes the KKH, Besham waits. When the Alpuri road is cut after rain, the headquarters waits. That is the ordinary year, not a special disaster paragraph.
Government colleges sit in Alpuri and Besham. Degree students still leave for Swat or Mansehra when they can pay the fare. DHQ Shangla at Alpuri is the first hospital. Besham keeps the roadside facility that highway cases reach first. Female literacy at 18 percent is the education fact for this district. A girls’ high school that stays staffed in Martung and Chakesar is the measure, not a photograph of the Indus.
Sources: PBS 2023; tehsil literacy rows; Besham tongue table; 1995 district notification. September 2026.