Tongi

關於Tongi

Tongi (Bengali: টঙ্গী) is a major township in Gazipur, Bangladesh, with a population of 350,000. It hosts the Biswa Ijtema and features a BSCIC industrial area, which produces BDT 1500 crore of industrial products annually, and marks the northern border of Dhaka since 1786. The Tongi Shahid Smrity high School compound is a mass burial site of the genocide committed during the Bangladesh Liberation War. It is part of Greater Dhaka.

Mir Jumla II (1660–1663) built a fort to protect the northern entry of Dhaka during his reign as a Mughal subadar (1660–1663). The subadar also built a bridge over the river Turag. Mir Jumla constructed a road, now a part of the Dhaka-Mymensingh highway, that connected Tongi with Bag-e-Badshahi. It served as an axis of urban growth in the 19th and 20th centuries as sites for establishment of new urban settlements - Gulshan (formed in 1961), Banani (in 1964), Baridhara (in 1972) and Uttara (in 1965) - were picked off the highlands along that axis road.

In 1786, Tongi-Jamalpur was designated as the northern boundary of Dhaka by the East India Company, reaffirmed by John Taylor, the first English Commercial Resident of Dhaka in 1800.

Overview adapted from Wikipedia under CC BY-SA. Photography via Wikimedia Commons.