Big coal engine wooden ships leaving the jetty on Buriganga, filled with famous fine Muslin cloths, jutes, blue and soaps to the way from Mediterranean Sea to Europe, Indian Sub-Continent to Jeddah and Basra in Middle East via Padma, Meghna river.

Not only through the river, Muslin, jutes, blue and soap were also exported through terrain routes, alias 'Silk Line' route through the mountains of China and India to Europe via Lebon, today's Lebanon, with using camels, horses and donkeys as vehicles.

People were then used to do business either in trading, meaning goods against goods or in gold, silver and cowry, the shell of the cowries formerly used as money in parts of Africa and Asia.

It's no tale. All about the ancient Dhaka.

This year Dhaka observes its 400th anniversary and Dhaka Chamber of Commerce and Industries (DCCI), in association with Bangladesh Asiatic Society, have taken an initiative to write down the Commercial History of Dhaka.

An 11- member committee has been formed on this regard to oversee the regular activities of the project and arrange regular seminar and workshop to review the history written so far.

Professor Dr. Sirajul Islam, president of Bangladesh Asiatic Society, said, 400 years ago, while Dhaka started growing the attention of the rulers as an important city, it was already a famous city for Muslin and jutes, leather, cotton, bell metal, pewter and brass.

Dhaka grew as a metropolitan in 1608 under the Mughal rule, the city was then known as Jahangir Nagar, named by Mughal Emperor Jahangir and

was a commercially important city of that time.

Afterwards, day came when Muslin was no longer in existence in the world except in museums and the city's golden fiber jute also lost its good days.

Prof Islam said, after witnessing lots of political and economical adversity, the 400 years old city is now the center of political, economic and cultural life in Bangladesh.

He said now the city has the most diverse economy

amongst Bangladeshi cities and has seen a modernization of industrialization, transport, communications and public works.

With huge transformations, Dhaka has grown accustomed to be a commercial city with leather industry, cotton, bell metal and pewter, button, glasses, printing and publication, ceramics tiles and most importantly ready made garments (RMG).

Delwar Hasan, editor of the 600 pages book, said the job of

accumulating all the oral history and information from other historical references is very tough.

"It is tough to accumulate information from different sources, many of which are oral sources, but it will be very useful for the people interested to know about the rich commercial history of Dhaka and obviously the next generation," he said.

"The project has another objective to make a guideline for future entrepreneurs and

business initiators of the country to make their plan using this resources," he added.

Hossain Khaled, president of DCCI, said the initiative was taken to remark the 400 anniversary of Dhaka and 50th anniversary of DCCI.

“We found that there is no such written history on Dhaka's commerce and industry, which could help people to know about the rich history7 of the city," he said.

"DCCI decided to take an initiative to record all the writ-

ten histories that we found in different history books and the histories we heard from pioneer businessmen and entrepreneurs," he added.

He said the project of writing the history was started in November 2007 and DCCI has allocated an amount of Tk 20 lakh for its English version, and the Bengali version - that is yet to start — would get the same budget.

The commercial history of Dhaka would be uncovered this October.