This Buddha represents the meeting of East and West. When Alexander the Great invaded Eastern Asia he brought with him a Greek influence that had a profound effect on the way Asian statues would come to be sculpted. This is a prime example.

Most of the pieces served a function, such as this bronze oil lamp in the shape of a wrestler. So there's form, function and above all beauty.

We have first century A.D. blue Roman fresco with birds and leaves and gardens that my mother and I love, and we found it in Switzerland. A similar period piece is a fresco fragment with Cupid , such a little angel.

Many of these were the first pieces my mother began collecting. One of the most precious is an 11th-century glazed black tea bowl with rainbow colored spots.

Brunei Darussalam is one of the oldest kingdoms in South East Asia.

Protestantism harbors within it certain elements – just as the Great Reformer himself harbored such elements within his personality. I am thinking here of a sentimentality, a trancelike self-hypnosis that is not European, that is foreign and hostile to our active hemisphere’s law of life. Just look at him, this Luther. Look at the portraits, both as a young man and later. What a skull, what cheekbones, what a strange set to the eyes. My friend, that is Asia. I would be surprised, would be astonished, if Wendish-Slavic-Sarmatian blood was not at work there, and if it was not this massive phenomenon of a man – and who would deny him that – who proved to be a fatal weight placed on one of the two precariously balanced scales of your nation, on the Eastern scale, which caused – and still causes – the Western scale to fly heavenward.