Every city has a place where you can suddenly see all of it at once. In Multan, that place is the Damdama, a great block of brick and earth that stands at the crown of Fort Kohna, the old citadel at the heart of the city. It is not a palace. It is not a shrine. It was never meant to be beautiful. It was built to watch, to aim, and to strike. Today it does something quieter. Its walls now open to painters, potters, and travellers, and from its roof Multan still spreads out below like a map of its own long story. The Punjab government describes it plainly as “a massive block of a building constructed on a mound of earth fill,” the highest part of the fort and therefore the highest point in all of Multan.
For CultuRise, the Damdama is one of the most honest heritage buildings in Pakistan, a working structure that has changed jobs over two centuries without losing any of its character. Here is its history, its meaning, the patient work of the Walled City of Lahore Authority to keep it standing, and why it stands as a textbook case of adaptive reuse.
A History Written in Bricks
To understand the Damdama, you must first understand the fort that carried it. Fort Kohna, also called Qila Kohna Qasim Bagh, stands in the centre of Multan on a mound that once separated the city from the old bed of the river Ravi. Its origins run deep into the past. The site was originally known as Katochgarh and is attributed to the Katoch Dynasty, with the first stronghold often dated between 800 and 1000 BC. Rebuilt again and again over the centuries, the fort reached its modern form as a serious military machine. Contemporary accounts describe walls 40 to 70 feet high and roughly 6,800 feet around, protected by 46 bastions, a ditch 25 feet deep, and four gates, the De, Sikki, Hareri, and Khizri. Of those four, only the Qasim Gate survives today.
The Damdama itself is a later chapter in that long story. Government records date the structure to the 18th century. It occupies the north western corner of the fort wall and was raised as a massive rectangular block on an artificial mound of earth fill, with two walls built on a slope and the longer sides rising vertical, stiffened by five rectangular buttresses.
There is a fascinating clue to its age. The Damdama appears in no earlier records of the fort, and a map of Multan prepared in 1853 and published with its author’s report of 1874 shows no such building inside the fort. That silence suggests the block was added during the turbulent years when Afghan, Sikh, and British powers fought over Multan, a time when the fort’s defenders wanted higher ground for their guns.
Its purpose, at least, was never in doubt. The Damdama was raised as a watchtower and a gunnery, the highest firing platform in the citadel, and it stood through the fort’s most violent century. The old citadel was heavily battered by the guns of Maharaja Ranjit Singh’s army during the siege of 1818. Three decades later, in 1848 and 1849, the fort endured a brutal British assault. After the killing of Lieutenant Alexander Vans Agnew on the order of the Sikh governor, the British demolished most of the fortifications in reprisal. The Damdama, its mound woven into the defensive wall, endured both sieges while ramparts around it fell.
Building on an artificial mound is a slow bet against gravity, and the centuries have not been kind. The structure settled, the brickwork cracked, and the added buttresses began to separate from the main block. A photograph taken by APP’s Hassan Mahmood shows a deep fissure running down the curved face of the old wall, and its caption says plainly what many restoration files have repeated over the years: the historic fort needs the attention of the concerned authorities.
The Highest Room in Multan
Why does a damaged artillery block deserve our attention? Start with geography. The walled inner city of Multan sits higher than the modern city, and the fort sits higher still, which makes the Damdama the single highest point in Multan. From its roof you can read the whole city at once: the crowded lanes of the old town, the clipped gardens of Qasim Bagh below the mound, and the great blue tiled dome of the Tomb of Shah Rukn e Alam rising in the foreground, with the shrine of Bahauddin Zakariya nearby. Photographers have climbed here for decades, and no image of Multan’s skyline is complete without this vantage.
Historically, the Damdama anchors the only surviving core of the fort’s defensive circuit, and it belongs to one of the most sacred neighbourhoods in Pakistan, a landscape of shrines that has drawn pilgrims for over 700 years. Archaeology adds yet another layer. During the digging phases tied to the site’s conversion, ancient coins and pottery were uncovered, and many of those finds now sit in the display cases of the gallery inside the building. Few structures in the country can claim to be a fortress, a museum, and a time capsule all at once.
WCLA and the Slow Work of Saving a Mound of Earth
The agency steering the Damdama’s second life is the Walled City of Lahore Authority, better known as WCLA. Established in 2012 by the Government of Punjab to preserve the living cultural heritage of old Lahore, the authority has since grown far beyond its home city. In a major move, it was renamed the Punjab Walled Cities and Heritage Areas Authority, with its jurisdiction extended to the whole province and responsibility for the conservation and restoration of walled cities, heritage areas, and heritage properties across Punjab.
On its own website, the WCLA notes that numerous heritage sites outside Lahore receive attention for preservation and restoration. Multan has become part of that wider mandate. The authority’s Director General and team met with the Commissioner of Multan to begin the project of conserving and rehabilitating the historic Qila Kohna Qasim Bagh, and conservation tender listings published for the authority have included roof works at the Damdama, the point where water does the most damage to a masonry mass. The building was already noted as under rehabilitation in 2011, and that process has continued in stages since.
Visitors can already see some fruits of this attention. The Damdama is cleaned, secured, and open to the public through the art gallery, and at night its facade glows under blue and green lights, a quiet signal that the old gunner’s tower has been welcomed back into the evening life of the city.
A Perfect Canvas for Adaptive Reuse
The Damdama is already living proof that adaptive reuse works. Its second career began when the building was converted into the Multan Art Gallery, which today runs free public exhibitions and master craft training in blue pottery, calligraphy, and the city’s famous camel skin lamps. Inside, visitors find paintings and maps that illustrate the many battles fought over Multan. A platform that once lobbed cannon fire now teaches hands to paint.
Even the fort’s other old rooms show how the pattern repeats. The Barood Khana, the old gunpowder store badly damaged in the 1848 siege, lives again as a Nigar Khana, an art house selling handicrafts. When one military building becomes a gallery and another becomes a craft bazaar, the whole fort mound begins to read as a cultural campus.
The physical character of the Damdama makes it unusually suited to further reuse. Its thick brick walls keep the interiors cool in the furnace summers of Multan, its mass is remarkably solid once water is kept out, and its rooftop is simply the best open air room in the city. What could it host next?
- A permanent museum of the sieges of Multan, using the battle paintings and maps already in the collection.
- A rooftop heritage cafe with a view that no new building could ever replicate, looking straight at the Tomb of Shah Rukn e Alam.
- Guided night heritage tours in the style WCLA pioneered in Lahore, with the illuminated mound as the finale.
- Craft residency studios where Multani potters and calligraphers work in public, turning the gallery into a living workshop.
- A sound and light show retelling 1818 and 1848 on the very walls that survived both.
Come See the Old Gunner’s City
Adaptive reuse is not about freezing a building in amber. It is about giving an old structure a new job that only it can do. The Damdama’s new job is to hold the best view in Multan, keep the fort’s memories, and house the crafts that refuse to die.
When you visit Multan, climb the mound. Stand on the roof where gunners once stood and watch the dome of Shah Rukn e Alam catch the afternoon light. Walk the cracked walls that Ranjit Singh’s artillery once hammered. Then step inside the gallery and watch a young apprentice shape blue clay, and you will understand the truest version of preservation: not keeping a building untouched, but keeping it useful, attended, and loved. After two centuries of wars and repairs, the Damdama is still watching over its city, only now with lights instead of cannons.
