Tourism in Bangladesh runs on Bangladeshis: about 15 million domestic travellers a year against fewer than 600,000 foreign visitors — and the foreign figure has fallen three years running. This is the industry in 2026: its arrivals and earnings, its idle new airports and reformed visa rules, and the closures, from Sajek to Saint Martin, that expose its fragility.
Jamdani is Bangladesh's most famous handloom craft: a figured muslin woven by hand around Rupganj and Sonargaon, inscribed by UNESCO in 2013 and registered in 2016 as the country's first GI product. Yet the weavers behind it earn little, and machine-made copies crowd their market.
Read MoreFounded under a 1990 act and teaching since 1991, Khulna University is the south-west's public university — and the only one in Bangladesh with no student politics and no session jams. From its 106-acre Gollamari campus beside the Moyur River, its 29 disciplines run from computer science to Sundarbans forestry research.
Read MoreLouis Kahn's Jatiya Sangsad Bhaban — the National Parliament House of Bangladesh, rising from an artificial lake in Dhaka's Sher-e-Bangla Nagar — is one of the twentieth century's greatest buildings. Commissioned in 1962 as the assembly of Pakistan's second capital and completed only in 1982, it remains the seat of Bangladesh's parliament and a national symbol.
Read MoreFounded in the 15th century by Khan Jahan Ali, a Sultanate general venerated as a saint, the Mosque City of Bagerhat — then Khalifatabad — is a planned brick city of mosques, tanks and roads on the edge of the Sundarbans, crowned by the great Sixty Dome Mosque and inscribed by UNESCO in 1985.
Read MoreBandarban is Bangladesh's most mountainous and least populated district — high ridges, the winding Sangu river and the country's highest ground, in the south-east of the Chittagong Hill Tracts. This profile covers its Indigenous peoples, its peaks and lakes, its great golden temple, and a trekking economy shaped by three years of security closures.
Read MoreThe Faraizi movement, founded by Haji Shariatullah in early nineteenth-century East Bengal, began as a call for Muslims to return to the obligatory duties of Islam — and became, under his son Dudu Miyan, a disciplined peasant organisation that ran its own courts and defied the landlords and indigo planters of the Bengal delta.
Read MoreFrom an elected king in a lawless Bengal, the Pala Empire grew into northern India's dominant power and the last great Buddhist empire of the subcontinent. This is the story of Gopala, Dharmapala and Devapala, of the universities of Nalanda and Vikramashila — and of the long decline that ended with the Senas.
Read MoreS. M. Sultan, the mason's son from Narail known in his village as Lal Mia, turned his back on the art schools and gallery capitals of three continents to paint from a house on the Chitra River. What he painted there — the farmers of Bengal with the bodies of giants — made him one of the founders of modern Bangladeshi art.
Read MorePrafulla Chandra Ray (1861–1944), born in Raruli in present-day Khulna district, was the Bengali chemist who founded India's first modern chemistry research school and Bengal Chemicals, its first pharmaceutical company. Known as Acharya, he discovered mercurous nitrite, wrote the History of Hindu Chemistry and gave away his salary to his students.
Read MoreMuhammad Shahidullah (1885–1969), Dhaka University's great philologist, traced the origins of the Bengali language, edited its oldest texts and, in 1947, made the first scholarly case for Bangla as a state language of Pakistan — the intellectual foundation of the Language Movement.
Read MoreLalon Shah (c. 1774–1890), the Baul mystic of Cheuriya in Kushtia, sang that God lives not in temple or mosque but in the human heart — and refused to the end to say whether he was born Hindu or Muslim. His songs remain the soul of Bengal's Baul tradition.
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