They speak Chinese, look Chinese, and cook some of China’s best-loved dishes, yet they are a people apart. This is the story of the Hui, China’s Muslims, heirs to a thousand-year fusion of two civilizations.

Chinese paintings from the 1850s. There was also Italian Felice Beato, who came to China in the 1850s to document Anglo-French exploits in the Second Opium War, and Scottish photographer

In the tropical lowlands of eastern Bolivia, between the Amazon basin and the dry scrub of the Gran Chaco, live the Chiquitano, one of the largest indigenous peoples of the

Spread across the summit of a great hill above the plains of southern Rajasthan, covering an area so vast that a whole city once flourished within its walls, Chittorgarh is

Out on the plains of southwestern Iran, rising unexpectedly from the flat landscape, stands one of the most extraordinary monuments to survive from the ancient world: a vast stepped tower

On the high, wooded savannas of the southern Congo basin, in the country where Angola, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and Zambia meet, lives a people whose carved masks

In a rugged corner of southeastern Oaxaca, where the pine forests of the Sierra Sur fall away through steep canyons toward the hot Pacific coast, live a small people whose

In the green borderlands where Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador meet stands the ancient Maya city of Copán, its temples and carved monuments among the finest ever raised in the

High in the mist-wrapped mountains of northwestern Guatemala lives a Maya people whose name is little known beyond Central America yet whose way of life reaches back thousands of years.

Along the sunlit coast of southern California and out to the offshore islands, the Chumash built one of the most sophisticated Native societies of western North America. Theirs was a