Khulna

Khulna began as a small riverside settlement on the edge of the Sundarbans. Boats carrying wood, honey and salt from the forest stopped here, making it a local trading place amid the channels of the lower Ganges delta. The waterways themselves changed over time: the Rupsha grew from a small navigable channel into a major river beside the settlement.

In the fifteenth century Khan Jahan Ali received lands in the wider Khulna region from the Bengal Sultanate. He is associated with the foundation of Khalifatabad, where mosques, roads and excavated tanks supported settlement on the forested delta frontier. Khulna lay within a landscape increasingly connected by these waterways and by the movement of people and goods between the forest and cultivated country.