Traders across Asia

diegas is a Flickr user who works as a guide in Asia, specializing in the Trans-Siberian and Trans-Mongolian railway, China and the Silk roads. He has amazing photos from all over Eurasia. Here are three examples, all of them portraits of traders and shopkeepers from different countries.

Click the photos to see them bigger.


A butcher in Uzbekistan (he is really handsome, I think, so do go look at the bigger size!)


A fishmonger in Turkey


A silk trader in Mongolia

All photos (c) diegas.

Kyrgyz men on TrekEarth.com

TrekEarth.com is a very nice website with the concept "Learning about the world through photography". I can spend hours browsing its galleries.

Here are a few Kyrgyz men from its Kyrgyzstan section. Click the links for the photographers' descriptions.



"Living on the top" by Lukas geez



"Mid-air" by Kristen Elsby



"The Roast Continues" by Ryan Smith



"Kyrgyz horseman" by Robin Merrifield

Throat-singing

Throat-singing (overtone singing) is practised in many parts of Central Asia, most famously perhaps in Tuva.

Two Tuvan singers, who are not identified by name on YouTube, perform the song Kombu. (This is likely an excerpt from Werner Herzog's documentary film "Glocken aus der Tiefe", about "faith and superstition in Russia".)



Yat-Kha mixes throat-singing with rock. This video, for the song Dyngyldai, was awarded the first prize for "low budget clip" at the MIDEM'97 in Cannes:

Don't miss Yat-Kha's covers of classic rock songs on his album Re-Covers ...

At the bottom of the Wikipedia article, there are several links to tutorials on throat-singing. Here is another one that's kind of cute.

...

By the way, these videos on YouTube always seem to provoke ardent discussions about what's "Turkish" and what's "Mongolian". Turkic and Mongolic peoples have been living together and mixing for hundreds of years, but there are apparently people on both sides who don't want to accept this.