The Multan Fort was for two thousand years the heart of the city — an enormous brick citadel raised on a separate mound forty to seventy feet above the surrounding plain. Its circumference was almost two and a half kilometres; it had four great gates (De, Sikki, Hareri and Khizri), forty-six bastions, a hexagonal outer wall, a Hindu temple, a palace and the two great Sufi shrines that still stand on it today. It was besieged by Alexander the Great in 326 BCE, fought over by Mughals, Sikhs and Afghans, and finally destroyed in 1848–49 when the British garrison stationed inside it after the conquest demolished what was left of the defences.
What survives today is the raised mound, the two great shrines, the stumps of two bastions, a small park called Qasim Bagh, the Ibn-e-Qasim Bagh Stadium, and the lonely Vans Agnew obelisk that the British set up to commemorate the two officers killed in 1848. It is the single most important historical site in southern Punjab and the natural starting point for any visit to the city.