The Manhattan of the desert — multi-storey mud-brick skyscrapers rising from Wadi Hadhramaut
Seyun is the principal city of Wadi Hadhramaut, Yemen's most extraordinary landscape — a 160km-long river valley cut into the plateau of the Rub' al Khali desert where multi-storey mud-brick tower houses rise directly from the valley floor like a pre-modern Manhattan. The Hadhramaut's distinctive white-washed mud-brick architecture — some towers reaching 8–12 storeys — was built by merchants whose trading diaspora stretched from Singapore to East Africa, sending their fortunes home to construct ever-taller family compounds. Seyun's great palace, now the Hadhramaut Museum, is a brilliant-white…
Wadi Hadhramaut was a cradle of South Arabian civilisation — the Kingdom of Hadramawt controlled the frankincense trade from at least the 9th century BCE, exporting across the Indian Ocean and north along the Incense Road to the Mediterranean. The valley's isolation in the desert plateau preserved its distinct language, architecture, and social customs well into the modern era. The Hadhramaut diaspora — Hadhrami merchants who settled across the Indian Ocean world from Hyderabad to Java — was one of the major vehicles for spreading Islam in Southeast Asia; entire Arab families in Indonesia and…