Mymensingh
— — the slow river light off the old ghat.
Not only on a wall.
“A river city on the Old Brahmaputra, about 120 kilometres north of Dhaka. The water moved here once, then moved again, and left the town facing a channel that does not run as it used to. Bangladesh Agricultural University sits at the southern edge. The ghats fill in the late afternoon, and the long-tail boats cross slowly toward Shambhuganj.
Mymensingh, 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.
Mymensingh sits on the bank of the Old Brahmaputra, about 120 kilometres north of Dhaka, in north-central Bangladesh. It became the seat of a new administrative division in 2015 and holds roughly 471,000 people inside the city corporation. Bangladesh Agricultural University, founded in 1961, occupies the southern edge of town with the largest agricultural campus in the country. The Old Brahmaputra is not the main river anymore – the 1787 Assam earthquake shifted the Brahmaputra's principal channel east, leaving the slower, narrower stream that the city now faces.
The river the city looks at is called the Old Brahmaputra, a roughly 230-kilometre distributary that was once the main course. After the 1787 Assam earthquake, the Brahmaputra's primary flow swung east through what is now the Jamuna, and the older channel was left behind. The ghats below town – Kachari Ghat and the ones opposite Shambhuganj – carry small ferries and long-tail boats across a current that is broad in monsoon and shallow in winter. The Brahmaputra Bridge connects the two banks just north of the centre.
Shashi Lodge, the zamindar mansion at the city centre, is the most photographed building in Mymensingh. The original was built by Maharaja Surya Kanta Acharya Choudhury in the late nineteenth century; the present pink two-storey structure was rebuilt in 1905 after an earthquake damaged the first. A white marble Venus stands in the front fountain. The complex is now preserved as a museum and sits within the campus of the local women's teachers' training college, a short walk from the river.