More than 70 percent of Bangladesh’s imports and exports pass through the Port of Chittagong (officially Chattogram), the country’s main seaport on the Karnaphuli River, about nine nautical miles from the Bay of Bengal. In 2024 it handled about 3.28 million TEU of containers and 123.9 million tonnes of cargo from 3,971 ships, according to the Chittagong Port Authority, making it the busiest container port on the Bay of Bengal; Lloyd’s List ranked it 58th in the world in 2019. A harbour here appears on Ptolemy’s map in the second century, and the modern port was organised under the Port Commissioners Act of 1887. It matters because most of Bangladesh’s seaborne trade depends on this one river port, and India, Nepal and Bhutan have also used it for transshipment.
2nd Century to 1340: Ptolemy’s Harbour and the Arab Traders
Chittagong’s long history as a port rests on outside witnesses, and the city’s recorded history reaches back to the fourth century BC. The Greco-Roman geographer Claudius Ptolemy marked the harbour on his world map in the second century as one of the finest in the East. The city straddles the coastal foothills of the Chittagong Hill Tracts, and the Karnaphuli, which runs along its southern edge, enters the Bay of Bengal in an estuary about 12 km west of downtown, so ships could lie in the river rather than on the open coast.
Arab traders frequented the harbour from the ninth century, and in 1154 the geographer al-Idrisi recorded that traders from Baghdad and Basra sailed to Chittagong regularly. Arab and Persian settlers who came to trade are generally credited with helping to spread Islam into what is now Bangladesh. The region was part of the ancient Samatata and Harikela kingdoms and was later dominated by the Chandra, Varman and Deva dynasties, until Sultan Fakhruddin Mubarak Shah of Sonargaon conquered it in 1340 and made it part of the Sultanate of Bengal.
1340–1528: Ibn Battuta, Zheng He and the Bengal Sultanate
Under the sultans, Chittagong became the principal sea gate of one of the wealthiest states in the Indian subcontinent. The Moroccan traveller Ibn Battuta visited in 1345, and the Venetian Niccolò de’ Conti came at about the same time. Chinese admiral Zheng He’s treasure fleet anchored in the harbour during imperial missions to the Bengal Sultanate in the early fifteenth century, and Ma Huan, a Chinese traveller of that era, described the port, as the pilgrim Xuanzang had described the area in the seventh century.
The trade was broad. Ships left for China, Sumatra, the Maldives, Sri Lanka, the Middle East and East Africa, and the port dealt in pearls, silk, muslin, rice, bullion, horses and gunpowder. It was also a major shipbuilding centre. Control was contested with the Tripura kingdom and Arakan; in 1516 Sultan Husain Shah’s forces, under Paragal Khan and Prince Nasrat, retook the city, which Nasrat renamed Fatehabad, “city of victory”.
1528–1666: Porto Grande de Bengala
A Portuguese fleet of four ships under João da Silveira arrived from Goa on 9 May 1518, though some sources say other Portuguese traders came earlier. In 1528 the Sultan of Bengal allowed the Portuguese to set up factories and a customs house, and they built a fort and naval base at Firingi Bandar. They called the harbour Porto Grande de Bengala, the Grand Harbour of Bengal, and the settlement grew into the most prominent Eurasian port on the Bay of Bengal.
When Arakan broke from Bengal in 1531, the Portuguese were left with a free hand for more than a century. They imposed the cartaz system, forcing every ship in the area to buy a licence; they seized the island of Sandwip in 1602; and in 1615 their navy defeated a combined Dutch East India Company and Arakanese fleet off the coast. A 1567 account by the Venetian Cesare Federici counted 30 to 35 ships calling each year, and by 1598 about 2,500 Portuguese and Eurasians lived in Chittagong and Arakan. It was also a base for slave raiding and piracy along the Bengal coast, which in the end provoked the Mughals.
1666–1887: Mughal Islamabad and the Coming of the Railway
In 1666 the Mughal viceroy of Bengal, Shaista Khan, sent a 6,500-strong army through the jungle while 288 Mughal vessels blockaded the harbour. The Arakanese surrendered after three days, the Portuguese were expelled, and the city was renamed Islamabad. Under Mughal rule the Grand Trunk Road connected the port with northern India, Fort Ander and many mosques were built, and shipbuilding expanded so much that Ottoman sultans had warships built here.
The Nawab of Bengal ceded the port to the British East India Company in the late eighteenth century. Its hinterland widened after Britain annexed Arakan in 1826, and farmers from Chittagong went on to help build Arakan’s rice economy, one of the largest rice-exporting regions in the world. The decisive change was the railway: from 1865 the Eastern Bengal Railway linked Chittagong with Dhaka and Calcutta, making it the main gateway to eastern Bengal.
1887–1947: Port Commissioners, Assam Tea and a ‘Major Port’
The modern port dates from the Port Commissioners Act of 1887; a commissioner began formal operations in 1888, and in 1889–90 the port exported 125,000 tons. Strand Road was built along the harbour. In the 1890s Chittagong became the terminus of the Assam Bengal Railway, which brought the tea, jute and oil of colonial Assam, now Northeast India, down to its jetties. Between 1905 and 1911 it was the chief seaport of the province of Eastern Bengal and Assam.
The busiest links ran east to British Burma, to Akyab and Rangoon, and to the other Bengal ports of Calcutta, Dhaka and Narayanganj. In 1928 the government of British India declared Chittagong a “Major Port”. During the Second World War it served the Allied armies of the Burma Campaign.
1947–1976: East Pakistan’s Port and the 1971 Liberation War
Partition in 1947 made Chittagong the chief port of East Pakistan, and by March 1948 the harbour was busy with international shipping. Muhammad Ali Jinnah visited and stressed its future, and companies moved in: the Ispahani family shifted M. M. Ispahani Limited’s head office from Calcutta, the Chittagong Tea Auction opened in 1949, the Karnaphuli Paper Mills followed in the 1950s and work on the Eastern Refinery began in 1963. The port’s management was reorganised as the Chittagong Port Trust in 1960. East Pakistanis nonetheless complained that Karachi received more investment.
The 1971 war hit the port directly. The declaration of independence, announced by Major Ziaur Rahman and M. A. Hannan from Kalurghat Radio Station, was relayed abroad through foreign ships lying in the harbour, and about 100 port employees were killed during the conflict. In August 1971 Bengali naval commandos sank Pakistani vessels in Operation Jackpot, and in December the harbour was bombed and blockaded. Afterwards the Soviet Union offered to clear the mines free of charge: 22 ships of the Soviet Pacific Fleet sailed from Vladivostok in May 1972, and the work took nearly a year and cost the life of one Soviet sailor, Yuri Redkin. Cargo tonnage passed pre-war levels in 1973, and in 1976 the trust became the semi-autonomous Chittagong Port Authority under the Ministry of Shipping.
2000 to Today: New Terminals, the Karnaphuli Tunnel and 3.28 Million TEU
A major expansion came with the New Mooring Terminal in the 2000s. Container handling is now spread across about twenty terminals, most of them privately owned, including the Chittagong Container Terminal, the Patenga Container Terminal and the OOCL terminal, while industrial jetties serve the Eastern Refinery, the Karnaphuli Fertilizer Company and the Jamuna, Padma and Meghna oil companies. The port is also home to BNS Issa Khan, the Bangladesh Navy’s largest base, and the Bangladesh Naval Academy. Piracy peaked early in the decade: 2000 was the worst year on record, and in 2005 Chittagong had more pirate attacks than any port area in the world. After more navy and coast guard patrols, the International Maritime Bureau recorded no incidents in 2019. Congestion has been the other chronic problem, with a congestion rate of 84.3 hours between January and July 2017.
Disaster struck on 4 June 2022, when explosions of hydrogen peroxide containers at the private BM Container Depot in Sitakunda, north of the city, killed at least 47 people and injured around 450; the fire was not brought under control until 7 June. On 28 October 2023 the 3.32 km Karnaphuli Tunnel, built by China Communications Construction Company and the first underwater road tunnel in South Asia, opened beneath the river near the port, part of a 9.39 km route. On 29 June 2025 the port shut for a day during a strike by National Board of Revenue staff, reopening the next day.
The fiscal year 2024–25 was the port’s best performance in 48 years. Throughput rose 7.42 percent in 2024 to 3.276 million TEU, the 2024–25 fiscal year reached 3.296 million TEU, and revenue hit Tk 52.28 billion. Average vessel waiting time fell from 4.1 days in June 2024 to 2.24 days by August 2025, according to port data. The river still limits ship size: the existing terminals take container ships of only about 2,800 TEU, which is why the Laldia terminal, signed with APM Terminals in November 2025, is designed for 6,000 TEU ships, and why Bangladesh is building its first deep-sea port at Matarbari in Cox’s Bazar district, with a 14.3 km channel dredged to 16 m for ships of 8,000 TEU. For the sea that feeds all of this, read our guide to the Bay of Bengal; for the delta around it, see the geography of Bangladesh; and to compare it with the region’s biggest hub, turn to the Port of Colombo.