Multan in 1848 was no backwater. With a population of 80,000, it served as the commercial hub for a vast region, its bazaars stacked with spices, silks, and valuables. The Sikh Empire had captured it in 1818, and for three decades it was governed by Dewan Mulraj, a Hindu vassal who paid tribute to the Sikh court in Lahore. After the British East India Company won the First Anglo-Sikh War in 1845, an uneasy peace settled over the Punjab. Mulraj tried to maintain practical independence while nominally answering to the Company. When Commissioner Frederick Currie demanded payment of overdue taxes and attempted to install a compliant Sikh ruler, Mulraj abdicated in favor of his son -- a move designed to preserve his family's grip on the city. Currie pressed ahead anyway, sending Vans Agnew to oversee the transition. It was a miscalculation that would cost two men their lives.

Mulraj had probably not planned the attack on the British officers. But once his troops committed the murders, he committed himself to rebellion, presenting Vans Agnew's severed head to the new Sikh governor and telling him to carry it back to Currie. Lieutenant Herbert Edwardes, the British Political Agent in Bannu, intercepted a copy of Vans Agnew's desperate letter and immediately began mustering forces. But Currie in Lahore proposed to do nothing through the hot weather and monsoon seasons -- a decision supported by Governor General Lord Dalhousie and the Commander-in-Chief, Sir Hugh Gough, who refused to expose European soldiers to a summer campaign. While the British waited, Mulraj dug up buried artillery, enlisted fresh troops, and welcomed defecting regiments of the Khalsa, the Sikh army. When Sher Singh Attariwalla, a Sikh commander supposedly allied with the British, openly rebelled on September 14, the Company's besieging force found itself too weak to maintain its position and retreated.

Reinforcements from the Bombay Army arrived in late November, swelling General William Whish's force to 32,000 troops with 150 pieces of artillery. Inside the city, Mulraj commanded 12,000 men with 54 guns and 12 mortars. The Indus River, flowing nearby, allowed British steamships to supply the besiegers with relative ease. On December 27, Whish sent four columns into the suburbs, driving Mulraj's defenders behind the city walls. Breaching batteries were positioned just 80 yards from the fortifications. Then, on December 30, a British mortar shell struck a mosque inside the citadel where 180 tonnes of gunpowder were stored. The explosion killed 800 defenders in an instant -- an event still ranked among the largest non-nuclear explosions in history. Mulraj responded with defiance, sending word to Whish that he had enough powder to hold out for another year.

The general assault came on January 2, 1849. British and Indian troops scaled the breaches in the city walls, and the fighting devolved into brutal house-to-house combat. Soldiers killed defenders and civilians without distinction. Whish ordered the surviving civilians herded into the main square -- an act intended to protect them from further crossfire, though the corralling itself caused additional casualties. With the city fallen, only the battered citadel remained. It held out for another two weeks under relentless bombardment until January 18, when British sappers detonated three mines beneath its walls. Massive sections collapsed. Mulraj offered to surrender if his life would be spared, but Whish demanded unconditional capitulation. On January 22, 1849, Mulraj gave himself up with his remaining 550 men.

The British found Mulraj's treasury worth three million pounds -- an enormous fortune in the mid-nineteenth century. Looting by both British and Indian soldiers was widespread. Whish's army, now free from the siege, marched to reinforce Sir Hugh Gough's main force. The heavy guns from Multan proved decisive at the Battle of Gujrat, which broke the remaining Sikh armies and ended the Second Anglo-Sikh War. The entire Punjab fell under British control. Mulraj stood trial for the murders of Vans Agnew and Anderson. Cleared of planning the killings, he was nonetheless convicted as an accessory after the fact for rewarding the murderers and using the deaths as a pretext for revolt. His death sentence was commuted to lifelong exile. By August 1849, the Indus and Chenab rivers flooded, and the heavily damaged citadel dissolved into what one observer described as an island of mud amid the waters.