Grand Trunk Road

The Grand Trunk Road is one of the oldest and longest major roads in Asia. For at least 2,500 years it has linked Central Asia to the Indian subcontinent. It runs roughly 3,655 km (2,271 mi) from Teknaf, Bangladesh on the border with Myanmar west to Kabul, Afghanistan, passing through Chittagong and Dhaka in Bangladesh, Calcutta, Kanpur, Prayagraj, Agra, Aligarh, Ghaziabad, Delhi, Amritsar, Chandigarh in India, and Lahore, Rawalpindi, and Peshawar in Pakistan.

The highway was built along an ancient route called Uttarapatha (Sanskrit: उत्तरापथ) in the 3rd century BCE, extending it from the mouth of the Ganges to the north-western frontier of India. Further improvements to this road were made under Ashoka. The old route was re-aligned by Sher Shah Suri to Sonargaon and Rohtas. The Afghan end of the road was rebuilt under Mahmud Shah Durrani. The road was considerably rebuilt in the British period between 1833 and 1860. Over the centuries, the road acted as one of the major trade routes in the region and facilitated both travel and postal communication. The Grand Trunk Road is still used for transportation in the present-day Indian subcontinent, where parts of the road have been widened and included in the national highway system.