Bangladesh's port city — a hilly bay where giant container ships are beached and dismantled by hand, Kaptai Lake stretches through the Chittagong Hill Tracts, and Mezban beef feasts feed a thousand people at once
Chittagong (officially renamed Chattogram in 2018, pop. 5 million metro) is Bangladesh's principal port city and second-largest urban center, built along the Karnaphuli River estuary where it meets the Bay of Bengal. The city's most extraordinary sight is the Sitakunda ship-breaking yards — a 20-km stretch of shoreline north of the city where the world's largest container ships and supertankers are beached at high tide and dismantled entirely by hand by 80,000 laborers, recycling 5 million tons of steel per year. This is the world's most concentrated ship-breaking industry, handling approxima…
Chittagong has been a significant port for over 2,000 years — Arab and Persian traders knew it as 'Chatigaon' from at least the 9th century CE, and the Portuguese established one of their earliest East Indian trading posts here in 1528, calling it 'Porto Grande de Bengala' (Great Port of Bengal). The city changed hands between Arakan, Mughal, and finally British control in 1760. Under the British East India Company and later the British Crown, Chittagong became the gateway to the tea gardens of Assam and the rice fields of Bengal, developing the deep-water port infrastructure that still serve…