Wedged in the high Himalaya, the Bhutanese kept a whole Buddhist civilization alive into the modern age, never colonized, and gave the world the radical idea of Gross National Happiness.

In the landlocked heart of Southeast Asia, along the great river Mekong, live the Lao, a Tai people and close kin of the Thai. Devout Buddhists and growers of sticky

A people of perhaps forty million, divided across four countries, who have endured genocide and betrayal yet kept their language and identity alive. The story of the Kurds, their mountains, their struggle, and their unbroken dream of a homeland.

In the high valleys of the central Caucasus lives the last people to speak the tongue of the ancient Scythians and Alans. This is the story of the Ossetians, keepers of the Nart sagas.

The story of the Chuvash, the singular people of the Volga who are the last living heirs of the Volga Bulgars and speak the sole surviving language of the ancient Bulgar branch of Turkic.

The story of the Udmurts, the Finno-Ugric people of the Kama forests, keepers of an ancient sacred-grove religion and a polyphonic song tradition carried to world fame by their singing grandmothers.

In the forested valleys of Sikkim and the Darjeeling hills, beneath the sacred snows of Kangchenjunga, live the Lepcha, the indigenous people of the eastern Himalaya. Calling themselves Mutanchi Rong

In the high mountains of the eastern Caucasus, where southern Dagestan meets northern Azerbaijan, live the Lezgins, one of the ancient nations of that great mosaic of peoples. Speakers of

The Lozi, also called the Barotse, are a Bantu people of the upper Zambezi in western Zambia, the people of the historic kingdom of Barotseland, with communities also in Namibia,

The Luhya, known in their own languages as the Abaluhya, are a large cluster of Bantu-speaking peoples in western Kenya and one of the biggest ethnic communities in the country.