Chinese training

The new silk road has already become something of a cliché, but the New York Times has an interesting article on the detail of what is happening – in a world of high fuel costs and slowing container ships, entire trains of Hewlett Packard computers are coming straight from Chinese manufacturing centres to western European hubs. Admittedly this is across Kazakhstan so not exactly the trading routes of antiquity. Perhaps as production moves west across China, this will become even easier however – though the border crossing can be hard enough as a tourist let alone as a valuable shipment.

Nancy Dupree

Her and her husband’s books are sadly rather hard to get hold of these days, but Louis and Nancy Dupree were two of the twentieth century’s leading documenters of Afghanistan. Nancy is in her 80s and still working in Afghanistan and their work has now lead to the opening of a new centre at Kabul University. The Guardian has a profile here.