Spotting tiles on a madrasa wall
Blue, turquoise and white: how I read a wall of tiles in five minutes, and where the chips show how they were made.
November 3, 2026 · 8 min
Sleeping in a caravanserai courtyard
A square of old stone rooms around a yard, and what it is like to wake up where the camel trains stopped.
Newsletter
The Caravan Letter
A free letter every Thursday: one stop on the old road, one thing to look at and one thing to know before you go.
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7 min read
Watching paper being made in Samarkand
Mulberry bark, a stone vat and a sheet lifted out wet: an hour at a workshop worth the detour.