Chittagong’s harbor was already on Ptolemy’s second-century map
Chattogram—still widely called Chittagong—is Bangladesh’s second city and an ancient natural port on southern Silk Road branches. Abbasid traders arrived in the ninth century; the Nawab of Bengal ceded the harbor to the East India Company in 1793. Today it drives about twelve percent of national GDP.
Reorganized as a port in 1887 with busy Burma links and declared a Major Port of British India in 1928, it later hosted Allied operations in World War II. The city now handles roughly forty percent of industrial output, eighty percent of international trade, and half of tax revenue, hosting many of the country’s oldest firms. It has since grown into the base for the largest Bangladesh Navy station, the main Coast Guard base, the eastern zone of Bangladesh Railway and the Chittagong Stock Exchange, one of the country's two stock markets with more than 700 listed companies.
Etymology stays murky among Chatigaon, Islamabad, Porto Grande De Bengala, and others. Bengali Chattogram ends in -gram, “village”; early Buddhist chaitya sites and Arabic shatt al-ghangh theories compete. Stone Age tools show Neolithic habitation; written port history reaches the fourth century BCE.
The port's long record runs through many rulers. Muslim conquest reached it in the fourteenth century, and royal mints operated there under the Delhi Sultanate, the Bengal Sultanate and the Mughals. From the fifteenth to the seventeenth century it served as an administrative, literary and maritime centre for Arakan. The Portuguese ran a trading post there in the 1500s, and João de Barros praised it as the wealthiest city of Bengal, until the Mughals drove out the Portuguese and Arakanese in 1666. In 1971 the Bangladeshi declaration of independence was made in the city.
Modern Chittagong covers 157 square kilometres on the Karnaphuli, squeezed between the Bay of Bengal and the hill tracts inland, with more than 5.6 million people in the city in 2022 and about 9.2 million across the district. Tea, jute and petroleum products move through its port, the busiest on the Bay of Bengal, and South Asia's only underwater road tunnel passes beneath the Karnaphuli there. Nobel laureate Muhammad Yunus comes from the city.
Source: Chittagong
