Grand Trunk Road
Photo: Unknown authorUnknown author, Public domain via Wikimedia Commons
The Grand Trunk Road (GT Road) is one of Asia's great historical roads and a major route connecting Central Asia to the Indian subcontinent for at least 2,500 years. It is a 2400 km stretch from Teknaf in southeast Bangladesh, across parts of India and Pakistan, to Kabul in Afghanistan.
Rudyard Kipling describes it in his novel Kim:
And truly the Grand Trunk Road is a wonderful spectacle. It runs straight, bearing without crowding India's traffic for fifteen hundred miles—such a river of life as nowhere else exists in the world. They looked at the green-arched, shade-flecked length of it, the white breadth speckled with slow-pacing folk...
In 2015, the "Sites along the Uttarapath, Badshahi Sadak, Sadak-e-Azam, Grand Trunk Road" were submitted to the tentative list of UNESCO World Heritage Sites. Sites along the historic road that are already on the World Heritage List include Agra, Delhi, Lahore and Taxila.
UnderstandThere was trade along parts of the route far earlier, but the road became clearly established during the Maurya Empire (322–185 BCE) when it was known as uttarapatha (road to the north) and ran from the mouth of the…
Get inOne has to reach Howrah, near Kolkata, to begin the journey from the eastern terminus of the route as described here.
RouteThe itinerary is presented here from east to west. State highways in India are referenced by their ISO abbreviations, e.g. WB 13 means West Bengal State Highway 13.
Alternative routesIn the 16th century, Sher Shah Suri re-aligned the original Grand Trunk Road at Sasaram in present-day Bihar towards Sonargaon in present-day Bangladesh.
EatThere are numerous dhabas (restaurants) by the Grand Trunk Road.
Stay safeParts of this route are in Afghanistan which, as of late 2025, is quite unsafe. The border region of Pakistan, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, is also risky. For details, see the linked articles.
Sources and licences
- Guide text adapted from the Wikivoyage article "Grand Trunk Road" by its contributors, available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Read on Wikivoyage · Contributors · CC BY-SA 4.0
- Photo: Unknown authorUnknown author, Public domain via Wikimedia Commons