Sonargaon

Sonargaon was the capital of eastern Bengal under the sultans and the muslin woven around it was the finest cloth traded anywhere, so light that a whole sari passed through a ring. What survives is Panam City, one street of two-storey merchant houses put up by Hindu traders in the nineteenth century and abandoned at partition, their plaster facades now half taken by creeper. The Folk Art Museum sits in a rajah's palace on a pond nearby. Goaldi Mosque of 1519 stands alone in the fields. It is an hour from Dhaka. The sultans moved the capital away in the sixteenth century and the muslin trade died with the looms.