Best Preserved Ancient Cities: Timeless Walled Cities
Popular destinationsPrecisely built to be the last line of protection for historic cities and their people, massive stone walls are silent sentinels from a bygone age.…
Dhaka, a city of layered depths, rises from the low-lying plains of the Ganges Delta with a restless energy that belies its flat horizons. From its earliest settlements in the first millennium to its current status as the heart of Bangladesh, this urban sprawl has worn many faces: a modest riverine outpost, a Mughal jewel, a British provincial seat, and now a megacity pulsing with over 10 million inhabitants within its core and nearly 24 million across its metropolitan bounds. Its streets and waterways carry the imprint of centuries—each bend of the Buriganga River, each cluster of faded Mughal brick, quietly narrates the city’s passage through time.
At twenty-three degrees north latitude, Dhaka sits barely above sea level, its terrain a carpet of tropical growth on moist deltaic soils. Whenever the monsoon rains fall—often with sudden ferocity—the city’s fringe of mangroves and muddy flats presses close, and the tributaries that outline Dhaka’s limits, the Buriganga to the southwest, the Turag to the north, the Dhaleshwari and Shitalakshya to the east, swell with water. With some 676 ponds and forty-three canals lacing its domains, nearly ten percent of Dhaka’s ground is liquid. The rivers shape everyday life: small ferries glide between docks in Old Dhaka, carrying traders and students alike, while beyond the core, larger vessels ply the routes to Narayanganj and beyond. Yet the rivers also bear the burden of humanity’s waste; by 2024, the Buriganga was known as one of the nation’s most polluted waterways, its banks thick with sediment and scourged by untreated effluent.
In the early 1600s, the Mughal Empire recognized Dhaka’s potential and elevated it to a provincial capital: Jahangirnagar, named in honor of Emperor Jahangir. Over seventy-five years of Mughal rule, the city transformed into a nucleic hub of muslin production—an ethereal cotton revered from Ottoman markets to European courts—and attracted merchants from Persia, Central Asia, and beyond. Palaces and forts rose amid carefully tended gardens, while mosques, such as the ornate Lalbagh Shrine, bore the refined curves of Mughal design. Dhaka’s streets, then narrow lanes of packed earth, echoed with the clatter of horse-drawn carts and the hum of artisans weaving the finest fabrics. Wealth filtered into the city’s elite quarters, where princes and imperial scions maintained residences, all the while small bazaars brimmed with ivory carvings, spices, and textiles destined for ports as far away as Surat and London. Only Venice was likened to Dhaka for its network of waterways—a comparison that spoke both to its strategic significance and to its mercantile reputation.
When the British assumed control in the late eighteenth century, they introduced layers of technology and governance that began to alter the city’s fabric. Steam engines first steamed into Motijheel, carrying coal to power burgeoning industries. Electricity flickered on street lamps by the turn of the twentieth century; rail lines threaded through the surrounding polders, binding Dhaka with Calcutta and Chittagong. Western-style colleges and the first cinemas appeared, while the waterworks brought piped supply to half the municipality. In 1905, Dhaka was designated capital of the short-lived province of Eastern Bengal and Assam, cementing its administrative role. Yet under the Raj, narrow alleyways of Old Dhaka held onto centuries-old trades: bakers still drew clay in charcoal ovens, and tanners worked hides in open vats.
Partition in 1947 placed Dhaka at the heart of East Pakistan. The city’s institutions—courts, secretariats, and universities—grew outward along the grid that characterizes much of modern Dhaka. In 1962, the newly built Jatiya Sangsad Bhaban, designed by Louis Kahn, rose as Pakistan’s legislative seat: a monolith of reinforced concrete whose voids and blocks evoke both water channels and ancient forums. When Bangladesh emerged in 1971, that same hall became the nucleus of a nascent nation. By 2008, municipal Dhaka marked four centuries since its formal establishment—a testament to its enduring pulse despite social upheaval, flooding, and rapid population growth.
Today, Greater Dhaka accounts for over a third of Bangladesh’s GDP. Its skyline is a mosaic of corporate towers—Grameenphone’s headquarters among them—and crowded workshops where textiles, the country’s foremost export, are cut, stitched, and bundled for global shipment. Yet this modern prosperity sits alongside vast informal networks: roadside vendors hawk clay pots beside glass-fronted boutiques; rickshaw pullers weave through morning traffic in Old Dhaka’s twisting lanes; and nearly eight hundred thousand garment workers keep looms humming in crammed factories. Slum settlements, estimated at some three to five thousand across the city in 2016, house roughly thirty percent of the populace, their makeshift lanes lacking regular sanitation. Water and electricity often arrive unpredictably; families share communal taps and latrines. The pace of newcomers—migrants drawn by the promise of work—outstrips the city’s capacity to extend basic services.
Dhaka’s people are as varied as its rivers. The native “Dhakaite” community preserves an urban Bengali dialect, while Urdu-speaking Bihari refugees and tribal groups—Rohingya, Santhal, Khasi—contribute their voices to the city’s chorus. Islam predominates, embraced by nineteen million residents, though Hindu, Christian, Buddhist, and Ahmadiya minorities animate temples, churches, and mosques alike. Every February, the Ekushey Book Fair transforms campus lawns into a month-long celebration of language and remembrance, honoring the 1952 martyrs who demanded Bengali’s recognition. In April, Pohela Baishakh’s processions unfurl in bursts of color: women don red-bordered saris, brass bands herald the new year, and street dancers twirl beneath canopies of painted rickshaws. UNESCO has recognized Dhaka’s Jamdani weaving, its New Year parade, and the ornate rickshaw art as fragile legacies—practices that anchor modern life to centuries of craft and communal ritual.
No account of Dhaka is complete without its aromas. At dawn, carts wheel steaming pots of nihari—spicy beef stew—into Old Dhaka’s lanes, where students and laborers queue, spoons clinking against the brass bowls. Kacchi Biryani, a layered rice dish fragrant with saffron and studded with goat-stewed potatoes, traces its origins to the Nawab kitchens; Fakhruddin’s, one of the city’s oldest outlets, still serves plates rippling with aroma. Murag Pulao and Ilish Pulao offer chicken and hilsa fish variants, each regionally infused. Borhani, a yogurt-based cooler spiced with green chilies and mustard seeds, accompanies these feasts. Amid the shouts of street vendors, stalls sell khichuri during monsoon afternoons, the steaming porridge a comfort in damp heat.
Dhaka’s architecture spans five centuries. The 1454 Binat Bibi Mosque in Narinda stands as the city’s oldest brick edifice, modest in scale yet rich in the patina of weathered terracotta. Old Dhaka’s caravanserais—Bara and Choto Katra—once bristled with traders and horses; now their arches crumble beneath a tangle of laundry lines. British-era buildings in Ramna, such as Curzon Hall, marry imperial loftiness with Mughal motifs. In Sher-e-Bangla Nagar, the parliament complex occupies two hundred acres: I-shaped pools reflect concrete panels pierced by geometric voids. Contemporary towers rise in Gulshan and Banani, glass facades reflecting the tropical sky. Even so, a chorus of heritage activists warns of “concrete jungle” sprawl: as cranes dot the horizon, the survival of narrow-lane courtyards and faded frescoes grows precarious.
Congestion defines Dhaka’s streets. Cycle rickshaws—over 400,000 at peak—stand as the city’s most visible transport; every morning they fan out from depots, passengers crammed between wooden seats. Auto rickshaws powered by compressed natural gas offer a swifter, though costlier, alternative. Buses—once crimson BRTC Routemasters—serve 1.9 million passengers daily (as of 2007), yet their fleet is fragmented among private operators. In late 2024, the Bus Rapid Transit line from Gazipur to the city center promises to cut a four-hour slog to forty minutes. Metro Rail’s inaugural line opened in December 2022—a first in South Asia’s largest city without a mass rapid transit system. Ahead lie five more lines and proposals for subway and orbital rail. Meanwhile, the Dhaka Elevated Expressway threads above congested arteries, and its Ashulia extension, slated for 2026, aims to link suburbs with downtown.
Fifteen kilometers north of the center, Hazrat Shahjalal International Airport handled over 11 million passengers in 2023, far beyond its eight-million capacity—a shortfall that the new Terminal 3, to open fully in October 2024, will address with twelve boarding bridges and sixteen conveyor belts. Within the city, fifty-four embassies cluster in Gulshan and Baridhara, where tree-lined avenues conceal diplomatic enclaves. Agargaon hosts UN, World Bank, and ADB offices; Segunbagicha shelters the High Court and Foreign Ministry; Sher-e-Bangla Nagar houses defense and planning ministries. The Bangladesh Army, Navy, and Air Force maintain headquarters in cantonments scattered across Mirpur and Tejgaon.
Rapid growth places acute strain on Dhaka’s infrastructure. Water supply, electricity, and sanitation chronically lag behind ever-rising demand. Air quality suffers under vehicular and industrial emissions; by 2024, the city ranked among the world’s twenty most polluted. Flooding, aggravated by land subsidence and inadequate drainage, threatens low-lying neighborhoods each monsoon. Yet city planners seek relief through tax incentives for development beyond the urban core, aiming to disperse industry and housing. Meanwhile, the expansion of ride-sharing services—Uber, Pathao—has begun to reshape traffic patterns, even as informal transport persists as a pillar of local livelihoods.
Dhaka’s essence lies in contrasts: ruined Mughal mosques stand beside glass towers; the rich sip tea in guarded clubs while a quarter of the population inhabits unplanned settlements; riverboats glide under concrete flyovers. Each dawn, workers file from ramshackle homes to factories that power a national economy; each evening, the city spills with street-food aromas and the clanging rhythm of rickshaw spokes. In festivals and sermons, in classrooms and markets, Dhaka’s residents forge a shared identity, one that embraces heritage even as it adapts to the ceaseless demands of modern life. This is a metropolis that breathes with history and with hope—a city neither static nor wholly at ease, yet sustained by an enduring vitality that courses through every narrow lane and broad boulevard.
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