:: Multan Fort

The Multan Fort was built on a detached, rather, high mound of earth separated from the city by the bed of an old branch of the river Ravi. There is no Fort now as it was destroyed by the British Garrison which was stationed there for a long time but the entire site is known as the Fort. The Fort site now looks as a part of the city because instead of the river it is now separated by a road which looks more like a bazar and remains crowded throughout the day. Nobody knows when Multan Fort came into being but it was there and it was admired and desired by kings and emperors throughout centuries'.

It was considered as one of the best forts of the sub-continent from the defence as well as architectural points of view. When it was intact its circuit was 6,800 feet or, say, about one and a half mile. It had 46 bastions including two flanking towers at each of the four gates named as the De, the Sikki. the Hareri and the Khizri Gate.

The Khizri Gate was called so because it led directly to the river which was considered to be under the protection of the saint Khawaja Khizer. Description of the Multan Fort as recorded by John Duntop, who visited the city and the Fort on the eve of the British occupation in 1849 is reproduced below: "The Fort stands on the highest part of the mound on which the town is built it is an anciente formed by a hexagonal wall from forty to seventy feet high, the longest side of which faces the north-west and extends for 600 yards, and which isolates it from the town. A ditch twenty-five feet deep and forty feet wide is on the fort side of the wall, behind which is a glacis exhibiting a face of some eighteen feet high, and so thick as to present an almost impregnable rocky mound. Within the fort, and on a very considerable elevation, stands the citadel, in itself of very great strength. The walls are flanked by thirty towers, and enclose numerous houses, mosques, a Hindu temple of high antiquity, and a Khan's palace, the beauty of which was severely damaged by the battering it got from thegunsof Ranjeet Singh in 1818. This fortification is said to be more regular in construction than any other laid down by native engineers. Mr. Vans Agnew-the unfortunate political agent whose murder ,with that of his companion, Lieutenant Anderson, gave rise to the recent hostilities to the British Resident at Lahore, that he had seen many forts in India, but one that could compare with Mooltan the ramparts of which bristled with eighty pieces of ordnance".A correspondent of Bombay Times, who also visitedthe Multan Fort around the same time recorded : "The Fortress was filled with stores to profusion. I think Mooltan is the beauideal of a Buneca's Fort, or rather fortified shop: Never perhaps in India have such depots existed of merchandise and arms, amalgamated as they with avarice. Here opium, indigo, salt, sulphur, and every known drug, are heaped in endless profusion-there apparently ancient in the bowels of the earth disclose their huge hoards of wheat and rice; here stacks of leathern ghee vessels, brimming with the grease, fill the pucka receptacles below ground. The silk and shawls reveal in darkness, bales rise on bales, here some mamoth chest discovering glittering scabbards of gold and gems-there reveals tiers of copper cansters crammed with gold Mohurs: My pen cannot describe the variety of wealth displayed to the inquisitive eyes". Once this was the position of the Multan Fort but during the British occupation everything was lost an finished forever. With the passage of time the British stronghold over India grew stronger and stronger, and the importance of Multan was lost gradually. The Multan Fort and other important historical places deteriorated slowly and sadly turned into ruins