About Bangladesh
The People’s Republic of Bangladesh - গণপ্রজাতন্ত্রী বাংলাদেশ - is a country of 175 M people packed into 148,460 km² of delta, making it one of the most densely populated nations on Earth.
The official record
🏛️ State & government
🌐 Everyday details
National symbols
The flag, the anthem and the living things that stand for the country.
National flag
Bottle-green field with a red disc, set slightly toward the hoist
National anthem
Amar Sonar Bangla - words and music by Rabindranath Tagore
National flower
Shapla - white water lily (Nymphaea nouchali)
National fruit
Jackfruit (kathal)
National tree
Mango tree (aam)
National animal
Royal Bengal Tiger
National bird
Oriental magpie-robin (doel)
National fish
Hilsa (ilish)
National sport
Kabaddi (ha-du-du)
National mosque
Baitul Mukarram, Dhaka
National poet
Kazi Nazrul Islam - the rebel poet
National monument
Jatiyo Smriti Soudho, Savar
Two thousand years, briefly
From the ancient city of Pundranagara to the Padma Bridge.
The economy
What Bangladesh makes, sells and earns from abroad.
Bangladesh has grown from a predominantly agrarian economy in 1971 into one of the world’s fastest-growing, led by export manufacturing, remittances and a large domestic services sector.
- Ready-made garments (RMG) are the backbone of exports, accounting for the large majority of merchandise export earnings and employing millions, mostly women, in Dhaka, Chattogram, Gazipur and Narayanganj.
- Pharmaceuticals meet almost all domestic demand and are increasingly exported to over 150 countries, supported by generic-drug manufacturing capacity built up under WTO TRIPS flexibilities.
- Leather and leather goods, centred on the Savar tannery estate, and jute and jute goods remain significant traditional export sectors alongside frozen fish and shrimp.
- Remittances from millions of Bangladeshi workers abroad - chiefly in Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Malaysia, the UK and the USA - are a major source of foreign exchange alongside export earnings.
- Key trading partners include the United States and the European Union for garment exports, and China and India for imports of machinery, raw materials and consumer goods.
- The Bangladeshi Taka (BDT) is managed by Bangladesh Bank under a broadly market-based, managed-float exchange rate regime.
What Bangladesh eats
Rice, fish and mustard oil - and everything built on top of them.
Ilish Bhapa
Hilsa steamed in mustard paste - the national dish in all but name.
Kacchi Biryani
Old Dhaka’s slow-cooked mutton and rice, the centrepiece of every wedding.
Panta Bhat with Ilish
Fermented rice and fried hilsa, eaten on Pohela Boishakh morning.
Bhorta platter
Mashed vegetables, dried fish and mustard oil - the everyday soul of Bengali cooking.
Bogurar Doi
Sweet clay-pot yogurt from Bogura, with a Geographical Indication tag.
Pitha
Winter rice cakes - bhapa, chitoi, patishapta - made with date molasses.
Mezban Beef
The fiery communal beef curry of Chattogram.
Chatpati & Fuchka
The street snack every Bangladeshi grows up on.
Things people get surprised by
💡Bangladesh has the largest river delta in the world, formed by the Ganges, Brahmaputra and Meghna.
💡The Sundarbans is the largest mangrove forest on Earth and the only mangrove tiger habitat.
💡Cox’s Bazar has the longest uninterrupted natural sea beach in the world, about 120 km long.
💡21 February is observed globally as International Mother Language Day because of the 1952 Language Movement in Dhaka.
💡Bangladesh is the second-largest ready-made garment exporter in the world.
💡It is the world’s largest contributor of troops to United Nations peacekeeping operations.
💡Bengali (Bangla) is the sixth most spoken language in the world, with over 270 million speakers.
💡The country grows more jute than almost anywhere else - the "golden fibre" of Bengal.
💡Muhammad Yunus and Grameen Bank won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2006 for microcredit.
💡The Bengali calendar has six seasons rather than four.
💡Bangladesh ranks among the top freshwater fish producers in the world.
💡The Jatiya Sangsad Bhaban by Louis Kahn is considered one of the finest legislative buildings ever built.
💡Bangladesh has one of the world’s largest river networks, with over 700 rivers and distributaries crossing the delta.
💡Dhaka is often called the "Rickshaw Capital of the World", with hundreds of thousands of hand-pulled and pedal rickshaws in daily use.
💡The Liberation War Museum and the Bangabandhu Memorial Museum preserve the record of the 1971 war for independence.
💡Bangladesh was the first country to elect a woman as both Prime Minister and Leader of the Opposition at the same time, in the 1990s.
💡The country is home to the Chittagong Hill Tracts, the only extensively hilly region of Bangladesh, with more than a dozen indigenous communities.
💡Rocket steamers - paddle-wheel river ferries introduced in colonial times - still run some services on the Dhaka–Sundarbans route.