The arts of the Himalayan region, extending from Kashmir in the west, across the central Tibetan plateau to eastern Tibet and Nepal, embody a rich fabric of traditions drawn from the Indian subcontinent, Central Asia, West Asia, and China. The result is a rich hybridity unknown anywhere else in Asia. Kashmir, Tibet, and Nepal occupied a strategic position in the facilitation of trade and cultural exchange from the earliest recorded times. These crosscurrents of early Indian Brahmanism (Hinduism), combined with the presence of Buddhism in western Nepal from its inception (Prince Siddhartha was born in Lumbini) have produced a rich layering of traditions—most markedly in Tibet, where a substratum of indigenous Bon animism flourished and had to be accommodated with the rise of monastic Buddhism. Tibet has served as the treasure house of many of the riches that traveled the Central Asian Silk Road. Luxury goods otherwise largely lost to us have been preserved in monastery collections there, thanks to a combination of the remote location, sympathetic climate, and historical circumstances. These goods include rare types of Sasanian silver, silk textiles commissioned by Tibetan nobility, Tang Chinese metalware and textiles, Indian Sultanate lampas silks, early Buddhist manuscript art, and Buddhist imagery, mostly in metal, secreted out of India for preservation and veneration in Tibetan monasteries. Few of these objects have survived in their places of origin. In other instances, murals at Alchi and Tabo monasteries in Ladakh provide our only glimpse of earlier mural and cloth painting traditions in Kashmir, which no longer survive.