Phuti karpas

Phuti karpas or phuti karpash, is a variety of Gossypium arboreum endemic to Bangladesh, especially near Dhaka along the river banks. It was believed to be extinct. The cotton from this plant was used to make Dhaka muslin, a rare extinct fabric. The explorer Marco Polo described Dhaka muslin as “the finest and most beautiful cottons that are to be found in any part of the world". It could be spun so that individual threads could maintain tensile strength at counts higher than any other variety of cotton. Collected in the Kew Gardens Herbarium are four specimens of Gossypium Arboreum Var. Neglecta the oldest one in the collection was collected by Joseph Dalton Hooker in 1848 in Sikkim, a region in Northern India between Nepal and Bhutan that includes Darjeeling. In 2015, in a project to resurrect muslin, phuti karpas plants are being searched by planting similar plants along the river.