Chittagong keeps its art in the hills between the port and the bazaars: print studios in Mehedibagh, a many-domed mosque at Chandanpura, colonial court halls and Bengali drama on Jamal Khan Road. Three days of galleries, stages and Thursday-night qawwali.
The university's fine-arts faculty on wooded Mehedibagh grounds: painting, printmaking, ceramics and sculpture studios, mural-covered boundary walls and a gallery hall that hosts student degree shows every winter.
Chittagong's most photographed mosque: a 1950s prayer hall crowned with a forest of onion domes and slim minarets painted white, red and green, wedged into the traffic of Sirajuddaula Road at Chandanpura.
The red-brick divisional court of 1892 crowns Parir Pahar hill: deep verandas, arched colonnades and cast-iron staircases from the Raj, still in daily use by clerks and lawyers. The terrace behind looks over the whole old town.
Some 700 graves from the Burma campaign in clipped lawns and flowering shrubs, with Japanese, Chinese and Dutch headstones set among British, Indian and African ones. The gardeners keep it immaculate and late light is best.
The colonial Circuit House of 1913, where president Ziaur Rahman was killed in 1981, is now a museum of the city: period furniture, liberation-war galleries and photographs of Chittagong before the port boom filled the hills.
Built in 1913 as a public hall for the city's Muslim literary societies, this stucco theatre beside Laldighi still hosts Bengali drama, recitation evenings and jatra troupes. The weathered colonial front is worth the walk alone.
The district branch of the national arts academy teaches Nazrul song, tabla, Manipuri dance and drawing, and its ground-floor gallery rotates exhibitions by Chittagong painters. Afternoon rehearsals are open to quiet visitors.
The city's main drama house: a 300-seat auditorium and studio space where groups such as Arindam and Tirjak stage Bengali plays most weekends, with film-society screenings and poetry evenings on the quieter nights.
The roundabout that serves as Chittagong's literary living room: flower sellers, banner painters, tea benches and Batighar, a book-lined shop where writers, actors and students settle in over coffee from mid-morning.
These lanes hold the descendants of Portuguese traders who settled here in the 1500s: Catholic families named Rozario and Gomes, a convent school, pork butchers found nowhere else in the city and a pale 1843 church behind iron gates.
The 1872 Assam-Bengal Railway headquarters stands red and shuttered on a hill under enormous shirish trees; the lawn below is where the city gathers for its Pahela Baishakh dawn concert and open-air recitals in the cool months.
The dargah of an 18th-century Sufi from Punjab draws sellers of rose petals, incense and sweets, and on Thursday evenings a circle of qawwals sings late into the night before a crowd no museum in the city could assemble.