Land area: 51,703 sq mi (133,911 sq km); total area: 55,599 sq mi (144,000 sq km)

Population (2006): 147,365,352 (growth rate: 2.1%); birth rate: 29.8/1000; infant mortality rate: 60.8/1000; life expectancy: 62.5; density per sq mi: 2,850

Capital City: Dhaka

Monetary unit: Taka

Languages: Bangla (official), English

Ethnicity/race: Bengali 98%, tribal groups, non-Bengali Muslims (1998)

Religions: Islam 83%, Hindu 16%, other 1%

Hiding behind the evening-news images of cyclones and floods, is a lush land with a rich history. You can visit archaeological sites dating back over 2000 years, check out the longest beach and the largest littoral mangrove forest in the world, and see the decaying mansions of 19th-century maharajas.

Bangladesh contains greater biodiversity than that of many countries taken together. Indeed few countries in the world can match its rich and varied flora and fauna which are not only a unique biological phenomenon but are also a great natural resources of the country.

The landscape is mainly flat with many bamboo, mango and palm-covered plains. A large part of Bangladesh is made up of alluvial plain, caused by the effects of the two great river systems of the Ganges (Padma) and the Brahmaputra (Jamuna) and their innumerable tributaries. In the northeast and east of the country the landscape rises to form forested hills. To the southeast, along the Burmese and Indian borders, the land is hilly and wooded. Famine and disease visit the land, but it is flooding that makes Bangladesh one of the most disaster-prone places on Earth. Storm clouds and hurricanes travel up the Bay of Bengal, hit the Himalaya along the nation’s northern border and stop, pouring water on the land, which is largely flat. When the rains come, villagers head for large concrete platforms scattered throughout the coastal areas to wait out the high waters. When the flooding recedes, villagers sometimes find that the local river has changed its course: It now flows around their bridge and through the center of town.

Bangladesh's Muslims and Hindus live in relative harmony. The Muslim majority have religious leaders, pirs, whose status straddles the gap between that of a bishop and that of a sage. Hinduism in Bangladesh lacks the pomp and awe of the Indian version, but consequently Hindu ceremonies are rarely conducted in the depths of temples to which access is restricted.

People here are very willing for you to watch and even participate. Buddhists today form only a tiny minority of the population. It's worth noting that the Bangladeshi pride in ancestry is balanced by the Islamic slant of the country's intellectual life which tends to deny the achievements of the preceding Hindu and Buddhist cultures.

During Muslim rule in Bengal, many new cities were built and adorned with palaces, forts, monumental gateways, free-standing victory-towers, mosques, mausoleums, roads and bridges, the remains of which are scattered over all the country. The Middle Age in Bengal saw the construction of a large number of Islamic monuments which were characterized by massive arches and bold clean lines.

When the Muslims conquered India, they were already possessed of a highly developed architecture of their own, which is characterized by such distinguishing features as the arch, the dome, the minaret and the mihrab, - features common everywhere in the Islamic world-and fundamentally based upon the building traditions of Western and Central Asia.

The Muslims revolutionalized architecture in Bengal by introducing new and improved techniques and certain common architectural features, generally associated with Islam. However these features were considerably enriched with regional building traditions.

The Savar Monument is a Bangladeshi landmark, and was designed and created to honor those who lost their lives for the independence of Bangladesh.