Historic Dhaka

Ahsan Manzil, the Pink Palace

You will see the dome before you see the building — it sits right on the Buriganga, and the pink is not subtle. The Dhaka nawabs bought the site in 1830 and put up the palace over the next few decades; the family lost their money, the place fell apart, and it took a restoration in the 1980s to bring it back. It has been a museum since 1992.

Twenty-three of the rooms are open. The furniture, the chandeliers, the nawabs’ dinner service and an elephant skull in the hallway all survive, and the photographs on the walls are the real draw — Dhaka in the 1870s and 1880s, when the Buriganga was still a working river and this was the grandest house on it. The first general meeting of the All-India Muslim League happened here in 1906, which is the sort of thing the guides mention in passing.

Go in the morning. By noon the riverfront lawn is full and the light on the pink facade is flat.

Lalbagh Fort and the mosque of Khan Mohammad Mridha

Lalbagh was never finished. Prince Muhammad Azam started it in 1678, was recalled to Delhi a year later, and his successor Shaista Khan carried on until his daughter Pari Bibi died inside the walls in 1684. He read it as a bad omen and stopped. So what you walk around today is three buildings and a garden inside a curtain wall — the Diwan-i-Am with its hammam, the small three-domed mosque, and Pari Bibi’s tomb, which is faced in black basalt and white marble and is the finest thing on the site.

The garden is the other reason people come. It is one of the few genuinely quiet green spaces in central Dhaka, and on Friday afternoons half the neighbourhood is sitting in it. There is a small museum in the Diwan-i-Am with Mughal weapons, coins and calligraphy.

Ten minutes away, down lanes that get progressively narrower, is the Khan Mohammad Mridha Mosque of 1704–05 — three domes on a raised brick platform, reached by a flight of steps, with the ground floor given over to rooms that were once lodgings. Almost nobody visits. It is still in daily use, and the caretaker will usually let you up onto the platform between prayers.

Star Mosque and the Armenian Church, Armanitola

Star Mosque — Tara Masjid — started life as a plain Mughal-style prayer hall in the early 1800s. Then in the 1930s a local businessman, Ali Jan Bepari, paid to have the whole thing surfaced in chinitikri: broken china and glass set into plaster. Hundreds of blue stars cover the domes and walls, and if you look closely at the panels you will find Mount Fuji, over and over, cut out of imported Japanese crockery. Nobody has ever fully explained why.

Ten minutes north, behind a gate that is easy to walk past, is the Armenian Church of the Holy Resurrection, built in 1781. Armenian traders ran much of the jute and leather business out of Dhaka in the 18th and 19th centuries, and this was their church. The community is gone — the last Armenian resident died in 2020 — but the building is kept up, and the graveyard around it holds several hundred headstones in Armenian script.

It is the quietest corner of Old Dhaka by a distance. Ring the bell at the gate; the caretaker will let you in and, if he has time, walk you round the graves.

Dhakeshwari Temple

Dhakeshwari is the national temple of Bangladesh and, by most accounts, the reason the city is called Dhaka. The story goes that a Sena king found an image of the goddess hidden in the jungle here in the 12th century and built a temple over it — Dhakeshwari means "hidden goddess". The original image was taken to India in 1947 and has never come back; the one in the shrine now is a replica.

The complex is bigger than it looks from the road: the main temple, four Shiva temples in a row at the front, and a courtyard that fills up completely during Durga Puja in autumn. Outside festival season it is calm, and visitors of any faith are welcome. Take your shoes off at the steps.

Sadarghat and the National Museum

Sadarghat is not a monument, it is a working river port, and it is the best hour you will spend in Dhaka. Several thousand people a day leave from here on triple-decker launches bound for Barishal, Bhola and the southern delta, and the terminal runs at full pitch from before dawn. Buy a platform ticket, walk the jetties, and hire a small rowing boat for twenty or thirty minutes to see the whole thing from the water — that is the view worth having.

Then go north to Shahbagh for the Bangladesh National Museum, which is the largest in South Asia and needs a good three hours. Forty-odd galleries over four floors: Pala and Sena stone sculpture, Mughal manuscripts, folk art, natural history, and a Liberation War section on the top floor that is difficult and worth doing properly. Everything is labelled in English.

If the museum leaves you wanting more of 1971, the Liberation War Museum at Agargaon is a separate building and a separate afternoon.