Multan is one of the oldest continuously inhabited cities in the subcontinent and was a subah capital under the Mughals.
Maharaja Ranjit Singh Ji took Multan in 1818, which opened the way south. It is in Pakistan.
Multan is one of the oldest continuously inhabited cities in the subcontinent and is called the city of saints for the Suhrawardi shrines of Bahauddin Zakariya and Shah Rukn-e-Alam, the latter one of the great buildings of South Asia.
It was taken by the Arabs in the eighth century and was the northern outpost of Arab Sindh for three hundred years, which makes it one of the earliest centres of Islam in the region.
Ranjit Singh Ji's army took the fort in 1818. Thirty years later the killing of two British officers there began the Second Anglo-Sikh War and ended the Sikh state.
The city is brick because there is no stone within reach of it. The blue and white kashi tile it is known for is what a brick building gets in place of carving, and the technique is still worked in the old city by a small number of families who supply the shrines.
Its Hindu and Sikh trading families, the Multanis, ran credit networks reaching into Central Asia and Russia and financed a large part of the region's long distance trade. Almost all of them left in 1947 and the firms went with them. A commercial history several centuries long ended inside one year.
Sawan Mal, the Sikh state's governor at Multan for most of its period there, ran an administration regarded on all sides as the most competent in the state.