Chittagong
— — a port that learned every language the sea brought.
Not only on a wall.
“The second-largest city in Bangladesh, where the Karnaphuli River meets the Bay of Bengal. The harbour has worked since the ninth century, trading with Arab dhows, Portuguese caravels, Mughal grain boats and now twenty-thousand-container ships. Inland, the hill tracts rise green toward the Burmese border. On the coast at Sitakunda, the world's largest shipbreaking yards undo what other ports send.
Chittagong, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
Chittagong, officially Chattogram since 2018, is Bangladesh's principal seaport and second-largest city, with a metropolitan population above five million. It sits on the right bank of the Karnaphuli River, about twelve kilometres upstream from the Bay of Bengal, in the country's southeastern corner. The Chittagong Hill Tracts rise east of the city toward the Burmese frontier, the only significantly mountainous terrain in Bangladesh. The port has handled long-distance trade since at least the ninth century, when Arab geographers recorded it as Samandar, a name then carried into medieval Bengali sources.
The Karnaphuli runs about 270 kilometres from the Lushai Hills in India down through the Kaptai reservoir and out at Chittagong, draining most of southeastern Bangladesh. Its lower reach is a working river: fishing boats, country craft, oil tankers, and the small ferries that cross to Patenga. The Port of Chittagong handles about ninety percent of the country's seaborne trade, more than three million containers a year. South of the city at Sitakunda, the Bay opens onto the largest shipbreaking coast in the world, where ocean ships come ashore at high tide.
The city runs on a monsoon calendar. Pre-monsoon storms, the kalbaisakhi, sweep in from the Bay in April. The southwest monsoon arrives in June and stays through September, dropping more than two metres of rain on the hills behind the port. Cyclone season brackets the monsoon, peaking in May and October; the 1991 cyclone made landfall near here and reshaped coastal policy. Winter, from December into February, is dry, mild and clear, and the harbour fills with the year's heaviest export traffic in textiles and steel.