Tea hills and a swamp forest on Bangladesh's Surma River
Sylhet anchors northeastern Bangladesh as district and division headquarters on the Surma River. Famous for tea estates and Ratargul, one of the country's few freshwater swamp forests, it ranks economically behind only Dhaka and Chittagong and draws pilgrims to the shrine of Shah Jalal.
The name is an English rendering of Śilhôṭ, itself usually traced to the Sanskrit Śrīhaṭṭa. That in turn honours Śrīhaṭṭanātha, patron deity of the Nātha dynasty, which encouraged settlement in the Surma and Barak valleys during the 12th and 13th centuries; later Hindu kings such as Gour Govinda kept up his worship. In 1303 Shamsuddin Firoz Shah, sultan of Lakhnauti, defeated Gour Govinda and brought Sylhet into the Bengal Sultanate.
Control passed to Baro-Bhuiyan landlords of the Pathan Confederacy in the 16th century, and after 1612 the Mughals made it their most important outpost in Bengal east of Dhaka. East India Company rule followed in the 18th century, and the region became a major source of sailors for the British Empire. Robert Lindsay, district collector from 1778 to 1790, remembered it as a small market with houses hidden among forested hills; exactly a century after his tenure began, in 1878, it became a municipality of about 1.75 square kilometres. A referendum in 1947 placed it in East Pakistan, and Bangladesh made it a divisional headquarters in 1995, a city corporation in 2001 and a metropolitan city in 2009.
The metro area held an estimated 1.03 million people in 2025, making it the country's third-largest urban area. Tea earns much of its income, and it hosts Shahjalal University of Science and Technology, Sylhet Agricultural University and the army's 17th Infantry Division at Jalalabad Cantonment. Several national finance ministers have represented the city, and local diplomat Humayun Rashid Choudhury presided over the UN General Assembly.
The landscape is dramatic: hills broken by wetland basins called beels, many of them oxbow lakes that sank during the 1762 earthquake. Limestone suggests the area lay under the sea in the Oligo-Miocene, and three quakes of magnitude 7.5 or more have struck in the past 150 years, the latest in 1918. Rainfall averages about 4,200 millimetres, roughly 80 per cent of it between May and September.
Source: Sylhet
