Multan is a city of shrines, mosques and bazaars, and almost everything worth seeing is concentrated in the small area in and around the old Multan Fort. The two great Suhrawardiyya shrines — Shah Rukn-e-Alam and Bahauddin Zakariya — sit side by side on the raised fort mound, their tiled domes visible from miles across the Punjab plain. Half a kilometre east, beyond the city wall, is the shrine of Shah Shams Tabrez. A walking circuit through these three, with stops at the half-buried Sawi Mosque, the abandoned Prahladpuri Hindu Temple, and the British-built Clock Tower, fills an absorbing day.
Beyond the fort, the walled city is entered through six surviving gates — Bohar, Pak, Haram, Delhi, Lohari and the now-vanished Daulat — and dissolves into a maze of bazaars: pottery and Multani khussa leather slippers in Chowk Bazaar, brass and copper in Hussain Agahi, dried fruit and sohan halwa sweets along the lane to the Phool Hatta Mosque. Multan is searingly hot from April through September; the rest of the year is the time to walk it.