Cox's Bazar

The town takes its name from Hiram Cox, an East India Company officer and superintendent of the Palonki outpost, who took on the resettlement of Arakanese refugees who had crossed into Company territory to escape Burmese conquest. A market established in the area was named after him to commemorate that work. Long before that the coast belonged to the shifting frontier between Bengal and the kingdom of Arakan, and the Rakhine communities in and around the town descend from those movements of people.

Under British rule this was a remote corner of the Chittagong district, living on fishing, salt and betel, with a small administrative station. It became a subdivision in the 19th century and a separate district only in 1984. The beach was noticed early as an asset — a road and a few rest houses existed before independence — but tourism on any scale came after 1971, and above all from the 1990s, as domestic holidaymaking grew and the strip of hotels at Kolatoli was built.

Two events have reshaped the district in recent decades. Cyclones from the Bay of Bengal have repeatedly struck this coast, the storm of 1991 causing very heavy loss of life across the region and leading to the shelters and warning system now in place. And since 2017 the district has hosted around a million Rohingya refugees who fled Myanmar, in camps at Ukhia and Teknaf south of the town — among them Kutupalong, the largest refugee camp in the world, which has brought aid agencies, traffic, jobs and pressure on land, forest and water to a district that was already poor.

Cox's Bazar is a Bengali Muslim town with an unusual mixture beside it. The Rakhine, a Buddhist community with roots across the border, keep their own language, dress and monasteries, of which the carved timber Aggmeda Khyang in the middle of town is the best known, revered by Buddhists across the district; they observe the Buddhist calendar, with lanterns released at Probarona Purnima in autumn. Inland at Ramu, monasteries, a large seated Buddha and workshops casting bronze images make up the oldest Buddhist centre in the district. Hindu worship centres on the Adinath temple on the hill at Maheshkhali across the channel.

The fishing communities along the shore have their own rhythm, going out in wooden trawlers and country boats and returning to landing places where the catch is sorted, iced or laid out to dry. Boats are painted, named and blessed, and bad weather is read carefully; families are often related to those across the water in Chattogram and Teknaf.

Then there is the holiday culture, which is entirely domestic. Bangladeshi families, students, honeymooners and office groups come for the beach, and the customs of the place reflect them: fully dressed bathing, group photographs at sunset, beach photographers with printed portraits, horse and speedboat rides, and stalls selling shells and dried fish to take home. Alcohol is largely absent, evenings end early, and the busiest hours on the sand are late afternoon rather than midday.

About 200,000 people live in the town, in a district of some two and a half million, and the numbers rise steeply in the tourist season, when hotels, restaurants, transport and stalls take on extra hands. Tourism is the town's business: thousands of hotel rooms, several hundred restaurants, and the guides, drivers, photographers and traders who depend on visitors. The aid operation for the refugee camps has added a second economy of offices, vehicles, warehouses and local employment.

Away from the strip the old livelihoods continue. Fishing fleets work the bay and land their catch on the channel side of the town; the drying yards at Nazirartek, the largest in the country, supply shutki everywhere. Salt is made in evaporation pans along the coast north of the town, and the district is also known for betel leaf, shrimp farming and rubber plantations inland.

Pressure on land and water is constant. Building along the beach has gone well beyond what planners intended, hill cutting for construction causes landslides in the rains, and the forests south of the town have thinned. Cyclone shelters and embankments are part of ordinary life on this coast, as are the drills and warnings that come with them. Out of season, in the monsoon, the town empties, hotels shut floors, and residents return to a quieter life of fishing and trade.

Seafood is the reason many Bangladeshis come. Restaurants along Kolatoli and the stalls behind Sugandha beach grill or fry the day's catch — rupchanda, the silver pomfret; bhetki; coral fish; large prawns; crab; and squid — usually served plain with rice, dal and a sharp salad. Hilsa, the national fish, appears in the season, cooked in mustard sauce or fried in its own oil.

The coast's defining preserved food is shutki, fish dried in the sun until hard, then pounded into bhorta with onion, garlic, mustard oil and a great deal of chilli, or cooked in a thick curry. It is an acquired taste, strong-smelling and much loved locally, and the drying yards outside the town produce it by the tonne. Chattogram's beef dishes reach here too, among them kala bhuna, beef cooked slowly until dark, and the mezban feast tradition of the wider region.

Rakhine cooking gives the town a second kitchen: sour and hot soups, rice noodles, fermented fish and shrimp pastes and chilli relishes closer to the food of Myanmar than to Bengali cooking, sold in small eating houses in Ramu and near the Burmese Market. Sweet shops sell the usual Bengali range, tea stalls serve strong milky tea, and green coconuts, cut open on the beach, are the standard drink of a hot afternoon.