Bangladesh

Bengal was long one of the richest parts of the Indian subcontinent, a centre of rice, trade, and the famous fine muslin cloth, ruled in turn by the Buddhist Palas, the Sena, the Bengal Sultanate, and the Mughals, whose provincial capital was Dhaka. British rule began after the Battle of Plassey in 1757 and brought catastrophic famines, including that of 1943.

The 1947 Partition of India made this Muslim-majority region "East Pakistan," governed from West Pakistan a thousand miles away. Resentment at political and economic domination, and at the suppression of the Bengali language, built into a movement for autonomy. When the Awami League's 1970 election victory was ignored, the Pakistan army launched a crackdown in March 1971; the nine-month Liberation War that followed, with Indian intervention at its end, was hugely destructive and ended in independence in December 1971.

The founding leader Sheikh Mujibur Rahman was assassinated with most of his family in 1975, and military rule followed until 1991. Politics since has been a bitter rivalry between two dynastic parties, the Awami League and the BNP. Sheikh Hasina governed from 2009 until a student-led uprising forced her out in August 2024, after which an interim government under the Nobel laureate Muhammad Yunus took over.

Bangladesh is one of the few nations built around a single language, and Bengali culture is intensely literary and musical. This is the land of Rabindranath Tagore, whose songs and words — including the national anthem — are everywhere, and of the "rebel poet" Kazi Nazrul Islam; of the wandering Baul mystic singers, recognised by UNESCO; and of adda, the long, rambling conversation treated as a social institution.

The population is majority Sunni Muslim, with a significant Hindu minority and smaller Christian, Buddhist, and Indigenous communities. The two Eids are the largest holidays; Durga Puja is a major event for Hindus and widely enjoyed. Pahela Baishakh, the Bengali New Year in mid-April, fills the streets with the Mangal Shobhajatra procession, another UNESCO listing.

Hospitality is warm and centred on feeding guests generously. Dress is modest, more so for women and outside Dhaka. Cricket is a national passion, and weddings are multi-day affairs with their own ceremonies and foods.

Bangladesh packs around 170 million people into an area the size of a small US state, making it the most densely populated large country in the world. Dhaka, the capital, is a sprawling mega-city of relentless traffic, construction, and rickshaws; Chattogram is the main port; and most of the country is intensely farmed delta, cultivated to the water's edge.

It is also a development surprise. Once a byword for poverty and disaster, the country has had decades of strong growth and sharp gains in health and girls' education, driven by the world's second-largest garment industry — employing millions, mostly women, and scarred by the 2013 Rana Plaza collapse — by remittances from workers in the Gulf and Malaysia, by microcredit, and by enormous domestic NGOs.

Water shapes everything: the monsoon flood, riverbank erosion that erases villages, cyclones off the Bay of Bengal, and creeping salinity in coastal farmland. Bangladesh also hosts around a million Rohingya refugees from Myanmar, mostly in camps near Cox's Bazar.

The saying goes that "a Bengali is made of fish and rice." The signature fish is hilsa (ilish), oily and bony, cooked with mustard or steamed in banana leaf; freshwater fish, prawns, and dried fish also feature. Rich, slow-cooked meat dishes include Dhaka's kacchi biryani of goat and fragrant rice, a wedding staple, and haleem in Ramadan.

Every meal has rice, lentils (dal), and vegetables, often as bhorta — mashes of potato, eggplant, or dried fish with mustard oil, onion, and green chilli. Street food is a world of its own: fuchka, chotpoti, jhalmuri, singara, and piyaju.

Bengal is famous across South Asia for milk sweets — roshogolla, mishti doi (sweet set yoghurt), sandesh, chomchom — and for winter treats made with fragrant date-palm jaggery. Tea, milky and sweet, is drunk constantly from roadside stalls.

The Sundarbans, the largest mangrove forest in the world and a UNESCO site shared with India, is explored by boat through tidal channels and is the last stronghold of the Bengal tiger, along with spotted deer, crocodiles, and vast birdlife. The historic mosque city of Bagerhat, another UNESCO site, is a fifteenth-century planned city in the delta whose centrepiece is the austere, many-domed Sixty Dome Mosque.

At Paharpur, the ruins of Somapura Mahavihara — one of the largest Buddhist monasteries south of the Himalayas — are a third World Heritage Site. Old Dhaka holds the Lalbagh Fort, the pink Ahsan Manzil palace, the Star Mosque, and the crush of Sadarghat, the river port on the Buriganga. Nearby Sonargaon, a former capital, has the decaying mansions of Panam Nagar.

The Sylhet division in the northeast is green with tea gardens and rainforest — Srimangal, Lawachara, and the flooded Ratargul swamp forest. Cox's Bazar claims one of the world's longest natural beaches, though it is busy and built up, and St. Martin's is the country's only coral island. River travel itself — on ferries and the old paddle-steamers — is the classic Bangladeshi journey.