In the heart of the Indochinese peninsula, around the great lake of the Tonle Sap, live the Khmer, the people of Cambodia and the heirs to one of the mightiest

High in the forested hills of the Western Ghats, in the Karnataka district of Kodagu, lives one of India’s most distinctive small communities: the Kodava, or Coorgs. A martial people

Along the narrow, green coast of western India, between the Arabian Sea and the Western Ghats, live the Konkani people, speakers of the Konkani tongue whose heartland is sun-blessed Goa.

The Konso are a Cushitic-speaking people of the southern highlands of Ethiopia, living in a rugged, hilly country southwest of the Rift Valley lakes. Numbering several hundred thousand, they are

In the volcanic land of northern Kamchatka, at the far edge of the Russian Far East, live the Koryaks, close kin of the Chukchi and among the northernmost peoples of

The Kpelle, known in Guinea as the Guerze, are the largest ethnic group in Liberia and a substantial people in neighbouring Guinea, numbering some two million across the two countries.

The Kru, or Kroo, are a people of the coast of Liberia and southwestern Côte d’Ivoire, one of the great seafaring peoples of West Africa. Numbering some hundreds of thousands,

In the eastern hills of Uttarakhand, amid forested ridges, high peaks, and shining mountain lakes, live the Kumaoni people, a Himalayan community whose homeland lies between the plains and the

On the warm plains of Dagestan, between the peaks of the Caucasus and the shores of the Caspian, live the Kumyks, the largest Turkic people of the North Caucasus. Settled

High in the trans-Himalaya and the Karakoram, in a cold desert of towering peaks and deep river valleys, live the Ladakhi people, heirs to a Tibetan Buddhist civilisation in the