Alchi: Treasure of the Himalayas, Ladakh's Buddhist Masterpiece. 424 pp. Munich: Hirmer, 2019. £54. ISBN 978 3 7774 3093 5

There is one small ground plan of the complex (p. 15), and a number of photographs and descriptions of the wooden components of the architecture, with an interesting though brief discussion (pp. 152 ff.) under the heading “Ancient Greece in the Himalayas” of the designs of wooden columns and entablatures in the Three Storeyed Temple. Discussion of the dating and historical circumstances is scattered through three separate chapters – “Founding the sanctuaries”, “Dating the sanctuaries”, and “Inscribing the sanctuaries”, and it is not always easy to navigate through a continuous argument that is interrupted by pages of photographs, but finally (p. 404) we read that “ … if this chronological scheme is correct, the foundation of the Alchi complex occurred roughly during the last two decades of the eleventh century”. [...]of recent research, much of it by co-author Amy Heller, some of the persons named in the inscriptions have been plausibly identified or placed in a more secure historical context.