Dhaka has been a Mughal provincial capital, a colonial river port and the birthplace of a nation in under 400 years. This route follows that arc — 17th-century katras and mosques, then the 1952 and 1971 sites, then the lanes where it all still happens.
Shah Shuja's 1644 caravanserai on the edge of Chawkbazar, once a 22-room riverside inn for Mughal traders. Only the great gateway survives, wedged between shops, its Persian inscription declaring the building waqf property forever. No ticket booth.
A 1706 three-domed mosque commissioned by Qazi Ebadullah, raised on a five-metre vaulted platform so the prayer hall sits above the flood line. You climb a stone stair to reach it; the arcaded undercroft below once housed students.
Dhaka's Shia imambara, founded in the 1640s under Mughal governor Shah Shuja and rebuilt after the 1897 Assam earthquake flattened it. The white facade reflects in its own tank, and the Ashura tazia procession has left this courtyard for over 300 years.
An 18th-century mosque resurfaced in the 1930s with chinitikri — mosaic cut from broken Japanese and English china paid for by trader Ali Jan Bepari. Hundreds of blue stars cover the domes, alongside an incongruous Mount Fuji panel.
Purpose-built galleries opened in 2017 tracing 1947 partition to the surrender of 16 December 1971: Pakistani army field radios, skeletal remains recovered from the Mirpur mass graves, and a wall of martyr portraits collected from families.
Marble columns raised in 1963 where police shot Bengali language protesters on 21 February 1952. Those deaths made Bengali an official language and, decades later, UNESCO's International Mother Language Day. The first monument was razed within days.
Forty-plus galleries running from Pala-dynasty black stone Vishnus and Sonargaon terracotta plaques up to a full Liberation War floor with the 1971 surrender documents. Closed Thursdays; Fridays open afternoons only.
The old Ramna racecourse where Sheikh Mujibur Rahman gave the 7 March 1971 speech, and where Pakistani forces signed the instrument of surrender nine months later. An eternal flame and a glass-brick memorial tower mark the two spots.
Built in 1781 by Dhaka's Armenian merchant colony on their own burial ground — roughly 350 slabs in Armenian script still pave the courtyard. The trading community is gone; a single caretaker family keeps the doors and the story.
A 400-metre Hindu artisan lane of narrow-fronted 18th-century houses where shakhari families still saw conch shells into white wedding bangles. The street was singled out during the 1971 genocide; several doorways carry memorial plaques.
A 1930s zamindar mansion with Corinthian columns and imported marble statuary, where the Awami League was founded in June 1949 — the party that would lead the independence movement. Restored by the Department of Archaeology as a museum.
The red-brick 1880 town hall on the Buriganga bank, named for Viceroy Northbrook and for decades the library, theatre and debating room of colonial Dhaka's Bengali elite. Its Indo-Saracenic arches still face the water.