Khulna
— — the last city before the mangroves take over.
Not only on a wall.
“The third-largest city of Bangladesh, set on the Rupsha and Bhairab rivers in the southwest delta. The streets give onto jute mills, fish landings, and the launch ghats that carry travellers down to the Sundarbans. An hour southeast, the Sixty Dome Mosque at Bagerhat still holds its fifteenth-century brick under a low Khulna sky.
Khulna, 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.
Khulna is the administrative seat of Khulna Division in southwest Bangladesh, set on the Rupsha and Bhairab rivers about 110 kilometres north of the Bay of Bengal. The city proper holds roughly 700,000 residents and serves a metropolitan area of around 1.8 million. Khulna grew through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as a centre for the jute trade, with the river providing access to the inland delta and to the deep-water port of Mongla, the country's second-largest, about 50 kilometres south.
The city is the principal land gateway to the Sundarbans, the largest contiguous mangrove forest in the world, which covers around 10,000 square kilometres across Bangladesh and India and was inscribed by UNESCO as a World Heritage Site in 1997. Launch operators run multi-day boat trips down the Pasur River from Khulna and Mongla into the protected zone, where the Bengal tiger, estuarine crocodile, and Ganges river dolphin still hold range across the tidal channels.
About 60 kilometres southeast of Khulna lies Bagerhat, the planned fifteenth-century mosque city founded by the Sufi general Ulugh Khan Jahan around 1450. Inscribed by UNESCO in 1985, the Historic Mosque City holds more than fifty Islamic monuments in weathered terracotta-coloured brick. The Sixty Dome Mosque, despite its name, carries seventy-seven low domes on sixty pillars and remains one of the most distinctive surviving examples of sultanate-period architecture in the eastern Indian subcontinent.