Stand on the bank of the Karnaphuli River at Chittagong today and the scene is one of constant motion: container ships at berth, cranes swinging boxes ashore, smaller craft threading between larger vessels, and trucks carrying goods inland towards Dhaka and beyond. It is easy to assume that this is a modern story, a product of containerisation and the garment trade. In fact, the port beneath this modern activity has been receiving ships for far longer than any living person can remember, and its history reaches back through sultanates, empires and trading networks that spanned the Indian Ocean.
The geography explains much of the continuity. Chittagong sits near the mouth of the Karnaphuli, close to the Bay of Bengal, at a point where river routes into the interior meet sea routes along the coast of South and Southeast Asia. A harbour here could serve both worlds: goods brought downriver from inland Bengal could be loaded onto ocean-going ships, and goods arriving from overseas could be sent upriver. That double position, river port and sea port at once, has shaped the city in every period of its history.
A Port Known by Many Names
One of the most telling clues to the port's age is how many names it has carried. Accounts of the port's history record that Greco-Roman geographers in the second century knew it as Pentapolis, and that Arab and Persian traders from the ninth to the fourteenth centuries called it Samandar. Later names included Sudkawan and Shatijam, and the Chinese form Che-ti-chiang is also recorded for the period from the fourteenth century into the first half of the sixteenth. Each name belongs to a different trading world, and together they show a port that was never the property of one empire or one language for long.
The Arab accounts are particularly important. Writings by Arab merchants and navigators from the ninth to the eleventh centuries describe flourishing sea trade along the coast of southeastern Bengal, especially through the port they called Samandar, identified with the area near present-day Chittagong. The Banglapedia entry on the Arabs notes that from the eighth to the twelfth century, the southeastern areas of Bangladesh, particularly east of the Meghna, became a busy hub of Perso-Arab trading activity. Aloe-wood was brought down to the port for export from a considerable distance inland, and rice was produced in and around the port in abundance. The same entry places Samandar roughly a day's distance from the sea, near the confluence of the Brahmaputra and Meghna or near the island of Sandwip, a reminder that coastlines, river channels and the exact site of an early port shift over centuries, and that historians identify Samandar with the Chittagong area rather than fixing it to a single modern jetty.
Behind those Arab accounts lay earlier kingdoms of southeastern Bengal. The region formed part of the ancient kingdoms of Samatata and Harikela, and later came under the Chandra dynasty, followed by the Varman and Deva dynasties. Rulers of southeastern Bengal commanded sea trade through the Chittagong-Comilla coastal area, and finds of silver coins in the region have been cited as evidence of the bullion that such trade brought in. Boat-building is also recorded for the period, which makes sense: a port that only received foreign ships would be one thing, but a port that built its own vessels could send its own merchants out as well.
The Sultanate's Maritime Gateway
By the fourteenth century, Chittagong had been drawn into the Bengal Sultanate. Sultan Fakhruddin Mubarak Shah of Sonargaon conquered Chittagong in 1340, making it part of the Sultanate, and under the Sultanate it served as the principal maritime gateway of a kingdom described as one of the wealthiest states in the Indian subcontinent. Medieval Chittagong traded with China, Sumatra, the Maldives, Sri Lanka, the Middle East and East Africa. Its recorded trades included pearls, silk, muslin, rice, bullion, horses and gunpowder, and it was also a shipbuilding centre.
This was the Chittagong that famous travellers encountered. Ibn Battuta visited the port city in 1345, on a journey that would eventually take him towards Sylhet and Assam. Niccolò de' Conti of Venice visited around the same period. The Chinese admiral Zheng He's treasure fleet anchored in Chittagong during imperial missions to the Sultanate of Bengal. These visits are often retold as colourful anecdotes, but their real significance is structural: a port that attracted a Moroccan jurist, a Venetian merchant and a Chinese admiral within a short span of history was plugged into several trading systems at once, not dependent on any single route.
The geographer al-Idrisi had already written in 1154 of a busy shipping route between Basra and Chittagong, connecting the port with the Abbasid capital of Baghdad. That single sentence captures a long-distance logic that would repeat for centuries: goods, people and ideas travelling between the Persian Gulf and the Bay of Bengal, with Chittagong as a staging point where cargoes changed hands, ships were repaired, and crews rested before the next leg.
Porto Grande and the European Arrival
The next great change came with the Portuguese. Two decades after Vasco da Gama reached Calicut, the Bengal Sultanate gave permission for a Portuguese settlement at Chittagong to be established in 1528. It became the first European colonial enclave in Bengal, and the Portuguese called the port Porto Grande, the Grand Port of Bengal. Portuguese ships from Goa and Malacca began frequenting the city in the sixteenth century, and the Portuguese introduced the cartaz system, under which ships in the area were required to purchase naval trading licences from the Portuguese settlement.
The Portuguese period, which is treated in more detail in a companion story on this site, lasted for more than a century in its dominant phase. The Bengal Sultanate lost control of Chittagong in 1531, after Arakan declared independence and established the Kingdom of Mrauk U, and that changed geopolitical landscape allowed the Portuguese wide scope in Chittagong. A note by Caesar Federici in 1567 recorded thirty or thirty-five ships, great and small, anchoring in Chittagong port each year, and by 1598 about 2,500 Portuguese and Eurasians were reported to be living in Chittagong and Arakan. The cargoes of this period included fine silk, cotton muslin textiles, bullion, spices, rice, timber, salt and gunpowder. Trade, however, sat alongside piracy and the slave trade, and that darker side of the port's history cannot be separated from its commercial success.
Mughal power eventually reasserted control. In 1666, the Mughal viceroy Shaista Khan retook Chittagong after defeating the Arakanese in a naval war, and the city was renamed Islamabad. Under Mughal rule, shipbuilding increased, and the port was integrated into the wider Bengali economy, which also included Orissa and Bihar. The Grand Trunk Road connected it with North India and Central Asia, and land grants for clearing hinterlands for cultivation supported economic growth. The Mughal period also left architecture in the area, including Fort Ander and many mosques, physical reminders that a port city is never only warehouses and wharves.
The British Port and the Modern Gateway
Following the decline of Mughal authority, Chittagong came under the control of the British East India Company in 1760. During the nineteenth century, the development of the Port of Chittagong and the Bengal and Assam Railway made the city an important trading hub of British India. The port became a key outlet for tea, jute and other commodities from eastern Bengal and the hill regions. This was also the period in which the modern port's infrastructure began to take recognisable shape: berths, warehouses, rail connections and the administrative machinery of a colonial port, layered over the older riverine trading town.
The twentieth century added new layers. Chittagong was a focal point of the anti-colonial movement and the site of the Chittagong armoury raid in 1930. It was a key base for Allied forces during the Burma Campaign in the Second World War. After the Partition of India in 1947, it became part of East Pakistan, and in 1971 the declaration of Bangladesh's independence was proclaimed from Chittagong. Each of these episodes used the port city's position, its harbour, its railways and its concentration of people and goods, for purposes far removed from ordinary trade, yet each also confirmed how central the port was to whoever held the region.
Today, the Port of Chittagong, officially Chattogram Port, is the main seaport of Bangladesh, located on the banks of the Karnaphuli River. It handles over 70 percent of Bangladesh's export-import trade according to one widely cited account, while other recent reports put its share of the country's seaborne trade above 90 percent, a difference that reflects different measures, seaborne trade versus all export-import trade, rather than a contradiction about its importance. It has been used by India, Nepal and Bhutan for transshipment, and according to Lloyd's it ranked as the 58th busiest container port in the world in 2019. It is described as the busiest container port on the Bay of Bengal. Its main exports in recent accounts include ready-made garments, jute and jute goods, leather and frozen fish, and its facilities include container terminals, general cargo berths, oil terminals and anchorage facilities. Congestion remains a recognised challenge, and projects such as the Bay Terminal and the Patenga Container Terminal are intended to expand capacity.
What has not changed is the basic pattern. Ships still arrive from the Bay of Bengal, cargoes still move between river and sea, and the city still lives by the exchange. The names have changed, from Samandar to Porto Grande to Islamabad to Chattogram, and the cargoes have changed, from aloe-wood and pearls to containers of garments. The work of the port, connecting an inland region to the wider world, has continued through all of them.