Multan is one of the oldest continuously inhabited cities in the subcontinent. It was the Malloi citadel Alexander was wounded at, in all probability. It held the Sun Temple, described by Chinese and Arab travellers as one of the richest shrines in India, which was destroyed and rebuilt more than once.
It was taken by the Arabs in the eighth century under Muhammad bin Qasim and was the northern outpost of Arab Sindh for three centuries, which makes it one of the earliest centres of Islam in South Asia.
It became the seat of the Suhrawardi Sufi order under Bahauddin Zakariya in the thirteenth century. The tomb of his grandson Shah Rukn-e-Alam, built between 1320 and 1324, is one of the great buildings of the subcontinent, an octagonal brick and tile mausoleum on the fort mound.
Multan is called the city of saints. Its shrines, Bahauddin Zakariya, Shah Rukn-e-Alam, Shah Shams Sabzwari, are the reason.
It was a Punjabi city administratively and a Saraiki one linguistically, and Punjab's histories generally treat it as a frontier rather than as what it is, which is older than any of them.
The Sikh period ends with the siege of 1848 and 1849. Diwan Mulraj had offered to resign the governorship of Multan in December 1847, and the revolt that touched off the Second Anglo-Sikh War began in April 1848, when a mob killed Vans Agnew and Anderson, the two British officers sent to install his successor. Mulraj was drawn into leading it. The fort was shelled for months, the magazine went up inside it, and the roof of the temple on the fort mound was blown off.
Trade is the reason for all of it. The city stands where the routes from Khorasan and from Sindh meet the Punjab plain, and Multani bankers ran hundi networks that financed trade from Astrakhan to Delhi, with agents in Central Asian and Russian cities into the nineteenth century.
It is a brick city because there is no stone within reach, and the blue and white kashi tile it is known for is what a brick building gets instead of carving. The technique is still worked in the old city and the tile on the tombs has been replaced by hand more than once.