In Puli, a town ringed by forests and mountain peaks, a workshop still makes paper the slow way: one sheet at a time.

Setting foot in the 150-year-old ink shop in Nara, I expected to get my hands dirty. Instead, I learned that my ink stick could outlive me by more than a thousand years.

Frogs playing the shamisen, skeletons in top hats, and a painter jailed for his jokes. Meet Kawanabe Kyosai, the eccentric 19th-century master whose humour still makes us laugh.

Born in India and travelled eastward with Buddhism, Siddham found an unexpected home in the temples of Japan, where this distinctive script has survived and continues to be practiced today.

Tucked away in Gion is Kahitsukan, a museum currently exhibiting works by 20th-century artists, none of them trained calligraphers, who brought their own sensibilities to the art of ink and brush.

Somewhere between 25,000 pieces of calligraphy, I find myself hit by an epiphany that calligraphy is nothing but the traces of the soul. A calligrapher explains why.

Next to a former royal palace in Riyadh sits a museum holding 7,000 years of history: a meteorite older than memory, lost gold cities, and the birth of a kingdom.

From a mudbrick citadel that gave birth to a kingdom to a forgotten 1980s mall reborn as a hub for contemporary art, Riyadh hides some of its best stories in plain sight. Here is where to find them.

At Hegra, women owned property and commissioned their own tombs, carving their names into rock that remains legible after two thousand years.

In a desert valley where camels once carried fortunes in frankincense and myrrh, lion-guarded tombs still watch over an ancient city that time and archaeologists have only begun to uncover.