This is the first volume to combine essays on the history and ongoing production of art in Ladakh and to recognize both Buddhist and Islamic contributions to the cultural environment. Drawing on recent research in the region, this book covers subjects ranging from the analysis of key sites and prominent contemporary artists, to the interpretation of metalwork, jewellery, and textiles. This publication will appeal to those with an interest in the Himalayas, art, Buddhism, and Islam.
 
Monisha Ahmed is an independent researcher based in Mumbai. She has been visiting and writing about the Himalayan region of Ladakh since 1987. She has a doctorate in Social Anthropology from the University of Oxford. The subject of her dissertation developed into the book Living Fabric - Weaving Among the Nomads of Ladakh Himalaya (Orchid Press, 2002), which won the 2003 R.L. Shep award of the Textile Society of America for the year's best book on ethnic textiles. She spends several months of every year in Ladakh, continuing her research on the region's material culture.

Clare Harris is Curator for Aisa at the Pitt Rivers Museum, Lecturer in the School of Anthropology and Fellow of Magdalen College at the University of Oxford. She is the author of a prize-winning book, In the Image of Tibet: Tibetan Painting after 1959 (Reaktion Books, 1999), and edited Seeing Lhasa: British Depictions of the Tibetan Capital 1936-1947 (Serindia, 2003) in conjunction with the exhibition (of the same name) she curated in Oxford. She is currently the director of a major research project, "Tibet Visual History Online", and continues to conduct research in the Himalayas.