Bangladesh

Bangladesh: capital Dhaka, population 175.7M, area 147,570 km². The 8th most populous country, in Asia. Facts, map, neighbours and more.

Bangladesh sits on the delta where the Ganges and the Brahmaputra reach the sea, a country built out of silt and rivers. Its share of the Sundarbans covers over 6,000 square kilometres of the largest mangrove forest on Earth. In 1999 UNESCO turned the date of its language protests into International Mother Language Day.

• The Sixty Dome Mosque at Bagerhat was raised by Khan Jahan Ali under the Bengal Sultanate, which ran from 1352 to 1576, and is the largest mosque left from that period.
• Lalbagh Fort in Dhaka was begun by Prince Muhammad Azam Shah, son of the emperor Aurangzeb; he was recalled by his father and the fort was never finished.
• Students marched in Dhaka on 21 February 1952 to have Bengali recognised as an official language of the state they then belonged to.
• UNESCO announced International Mother Language Day on that same date in 1999, and the United Nations General Assembly formally adopted it afterwards.

• Rabindranath Tagore wrote and composed the national anthems of two countries, Bangladesh and India, along with some two thousand other songs that Bengalis still sing.
• Tagore took the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1913, the first person from Asia to win a Nobel in any category and the first lyricist to take the literature prize.
• Grameen Bank began in 1976 as a research project by Muhammad Yunus, a professor at Chittagong, lending small sums to people no bank would take collateral from.
• The bank and its founder shared the Nobel Peace Prize in 2006, by which point similar lending schemes had started in more than sixty other countries.

• The Sundarbans cover 10,277 square kilometres in all, over 6,000 of them in the Khulna Division, and make up the largest mangrove forest anywhere.
• Somapura Mahavihara at Paharpur was one of the great Buddhist monasteries of the subcontinent and has been on the UNESCO world heritage list since 1985.
• Kantanagar Temple was finished in 1752 and faced entirely in terracotta plaques; its nine spires all came down in the earthquake of 1897 and were never rebuilt.
• The beach at Cox's Bazar runs 120 kilometres down the southeastern coast, one of the longest natural sea beaches in Southeast Asia.

• Jamdani is a figured muslin woven for centuries at South Rupshi on the Shitalakshya river, fine enough that Mughal emperors issued warrants for it.
• Bengal tigers hunt inside the Sundarbans, a landscape that floods and drains twice a day, which is why they are the only tigers that routinely swim between islands.
• Bengali is written in its own script and is one of the most spoken languages on Earth, which is why a protest about it became a global observance.
• Rickshaw painting goes back to the 1950s here, covers every panel of the vehicle with flowers, birds and film scenes, and is listed by UNESCO as intangible cultural heritage.

What is the capital of Bangladesh?

The capital of Bangladesh is Dhaka.

What is the population of Bangladesh?

Bangladesh has about 175.7M people — the 8th most populous country in the world.

How big is Bangladesh?

Bangladesh covers 147,570 km², making it the 92nd largest country by area.

Which region is Bangladesh in?

Bangladesh is in Southern Asia, Asia.