Dhaka — Capital of Bangladesh

Dhaka's recorded history as a significant urban center stretches back to at least the 7th century under Buddhist and Hindu dynasties, but its rise to major prominence came under Mughal rule, when it was named Jahangirnagar and served as the capital of Mughal Bengal from 1608, a status that made it one of the wealthiest and most populous cities in the Mughal Empire, renowned especially for its fine muslin cloth trade with Europe and the Middle East.

Dhaka's status as a political center faded after the Mughal provincial capital shifted to Murshidabad in 1717, and it declined further under British colonial rule as Calcutta (now Kolkata) became the dominant administrative center of British Bengal; Dhaka was briefly restored as capital of a new province of Eastern Bengal and Assam from 1905 to 1911 during the short-lived Partition of Bengal, before that arrangement was reversed under public pressure and Dhaka lost its capital status again.

The 1947 partition of British India made Dhaka the capital of East Pakistan, a province separated from West Pakistan by the entire width of India — a geographic and administrative arrangement widely regarded, including by many Bengalis at the time, as favoring West Pakistan politically and economically despite East Pakistan's larger population, a grievance that fed directly into the independence movement of the following decades.

Dhaka became the capital of a fully independent Bangladesh after the 1971 Liberation War, a conflict that included a genocide against Bengali civilians and intellectuals in the city itself, commemorated today at sites including the Shaheed Minar language-movement memorial (honoring the 1952 Bengali Language Movement, a precursor to the independence struggle) and the Liberation War Museum.

Since independence, Dhaka has grown explosively, driven substantially by Bangladesh's ready-made garment export industry, which employs millions and has made Bangladesh one of the world's largest apparel exporters — an economic engine centered heavily on factories in and around the capital, alongside rapid rural-to-urban migration that has made Dhaka one of the most densely populated cities on Earth.

Old Dhaka along the Buriganga River preserves much of the city's Mughal- and colonial-era character, centered on the Sadarghat river terminal, one of the busiest inland river ports in the world, where wooden launches and ferries still carry passengers and goods across Bangladesh's dense river network; nearby, Ahsan Manzil, the pink-painted former palace of the Dhaka Nawabs built in the late 19th century, now serves as a museum documenting the city's zamindar-era aristocracy.

Dhaka University, founded in 1921 under British rule, became the intellectual center of both the 1952 Bengali Language Movement — sparked when the Pakistani state initially tried to impose Urdu as the sole national language over the objections of Bengali speakers — and the broader independence movement of the following two decades, and several of its academic buildings, including Curzon Hall, remain closely associated with that political history today.

Dhaka is also widely described as having more cycle rickshaws operating within a single city than anywhere else on Earth, with estimates historically running into the hundreds of thousands; the vehicles remain a primary mode of short-distance transport across the capital despite chronic traffic congestion that ranks among the most severe of any major city, a consequence of infrastructure built for a far smaller population than the metropolis now holds.