Traditional Boutique Street Markets

New Market, Chandni Chowk, and Gausia Where a whole city has shopped for 70 years.

Built between 1952 and 1954 on 35 acres to serve residents near Dhaka University, Azimpur, and Dhanmondi, New Market remains Bangladesh's largest and oldest commercial shopping complex, its triangular core of roughly 440–468 shops still passing through the same tall arched gateways that opened in the 1950s. Over the decades, the complex expanded outward into a genuine shopping district: New Super Market for crockery, Bonolata for kitchenware, and Chandrima and Gausia markets for general goods, each adding well over a thousand shops of their own.

Directly across from New Market sits Chandni Chowk, a roughly 1,200-shop complex particularly known for clothing, jewelry, and shoes, and especially busy around Eid. Together with Gausia and the Dhanmondi Hawkers Market, this cluster forms what locals still call, with real affection, Dhaka's original shopping quarter—the kind of place, as one Daily Star piece on the area put it, that longtime Dhaka shoppers say beats even New York's Fifth Avenue or Bangkok's Chatuchak market for sheer personal nostalgia. It's worth noting that fire-safety assessments have flagged some of these buildings, including Chandni Chowk, as structurally at-risk, following a 2020 fire there—so while the shopping experience remains vibrant, it comes with the same infrastructure caveats common to many of Dhaka's older commercial buildings.