Follow the old trade routes through Central and South Asia and you'll find the same story everywhere: a craft that arrived on a caravan centuries ago, and never left.

Blue pottery, with its Persian-influenced cobalt patterns, is still thrown and painted by hand in small family workshops. Rugs take months on a single loom, each knot tied by hand, patterns passed down rather than written down. Phulkari embroidery, once stitched by mothers into a daughter's wedding shawl, still carries the same geometric bursts of color it did a hundred years ago.

What strikes me every time I visit a workshop like this isn't the finished piece — it's the hands. Watching someone tie a knot they've tied fifty thousand times, without looking, while they talk to you about their grandchildren. That's the real souvenir.