On the outskirts of Beijing, around a great lake and a hill crowned with temples, lies one of the most beautiful creations of Chinese civilization. The Summer Palace, known in

Step out of the sunbaked lanes of Khiva and through a modest doorway in a high mud-brick wall, and you enter a world that seems to belong to a storybook.

Of all the orders of warrior-monks that arose in the Middle Ages, none has captured the imagination like the Knights Templar, the mysterious and powerful brotherhood of fighting monks whose

In 1974, farmers digging a well near the city of Xi’an in China struck fragments of clay that led to one of the greatest archaeological discoveries ever made. Beneath the

In the very center of Tokyo, one of the largest and most modern cities on earth, lies an oasis of green surrounded by wide moats and ancient stone walls. Within

Some castles are about beauty. The Tower of London is about power, and it never lets you forget it. For very nearly a thousand years this grim, grey fortress by

Once the seat of a vast Renaissance state and demolished under empire, the Palace of the Grand Dukes of Lithuania has risen again from its foundations in Vilnius.

Some castles are single buildings; Óbidos is a whole town wrapped in walls. In the center of Portugal, north of Lisbon, rises one of the most enchanting sights in the

For most of the second half of the fifteenth century, England tore itself apart. The crown changed hands again and again, kings were murdered, princes vanished, and the great noble

On the banks of the river Neva in St Petersburg, its long green-and-white facade stretching in imperial splendour along the water and the great square before it, stands the palace