Heritage

It’s seven in the morning, but the frosty Mongolian steppe is still pitch black. With a thick blanket of clouds covering the starry sky, darkness is pierced by the hundreds of eerie lights emanating from the eyes of a large sheep herd.

Not many people in the Middle East have the freedom to enjoy art and marvel at their cultural history. This fear has been cultivated by certain doctrines which state that the admiration of artistic work is heretical. There is a link in some Middle Eastern cultures between statues and the worship of idols; the appreciation of statues is therefore often construed as blasphemous in some religious sects. The rampant looting of centuries-old artefacts and the ongoing destruction of thousands of years of antiquities have brought about a sense of deep loss and bewilderment for many people, in the Middle East, and abroad.

For well over a century, women of the South Korean island province of Jeju – “the Land of Women” – have made their living by freediving – ill-equipped – to the depths of the ocean to harvest seaweed and shellfish. Reaching depths of over 10 metres in chilly waters, and lasting between two to three minutes on a single gulp of air, over 100 times a day, the Hae-Nyeo, or “sea women”, are often seen as myth-like mermaids.

The Orient Express has the literary cache, and India’s Palace on Wheels has the opulence, but the greatest train journey on Earth is without doubt the Trans-Siberian Railway. For more than 100 years, locomotives – first steam trains, then diesel and electric engines – have run the 9,289 kilometres between Moscow and Vladivostok on the Sea of Japan. The world’s longest railway crosses seven time zones and the journey takes at least a week to complete.

A caravan of camels crossing the desert is the romanticised epitome of the Silk Road. Where were they going? What were they carrying? Why were they even journeying at all?

Two months after the fall of Singapore on the 15th of February 1942, the victorious Japanese began building a Shinto shrine in the forests of the western part of MacRitchie Reservoir in Singapore.

Singapore's renaissance woman, Sylvia Kho (1917–2013) was an innovator and entrepreneur in the arts of fashion, beauty and decoration. Learn more about her amazing life.

As the Paris Agreement on climate change comes into effect, many people are left wondering if it’s already too late to save many of the world’s vulnerable low-lying coastal communities. The science shows that sea levels worldwide have been rising at a rate of 3.5 millimetres per year since the early 1990s. This rising sea level is directly linked to global climate change due to three important factors: the warming of the oceans, or thermal expansion; the melting of glaciers; and ice loss from Greenland and Antarctica.