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First in a series on Kuwait's merchant houses. A business founded fourteen years ahead of the country's first oil export. What survives of the name, and what we do not know about its beginning.
Twenty kilometres off Kuwait City, with a Dilmun town, a Hellenistic fort and a Christian monastery beneath it, and a village emptied of its inhabitants in the summer of 1990.
A silver body nobody haggles over at the market, and grain cooked in its broth then folded onto it. Why this one and not another, and where the name came from.
Three columns absent from no photograph taken from the sea, and their first purpose was not the view. Why a reservoir was designed to be a landmark.
A coast and trade cuisine before it was a desert one: how rice, wheat and the spice that arrived on the ships shaped the food, and why it is still cooked at home.
Scarce rain and grazing pushed families out; an open port and a workable local authority drew them in. Which families came, and what they added.
Wheat soaked overnight, cooked slowly with lamb and beaten with a long wooden paddle until the two become one texture. Why it is made for an occasion rather than a day.
Anza, the Utub, and a migration that ran through Zubara. The 1752 agreement, the 1899 treaty, and the men who shaped what followed.
Law 32 of 1961 created the monetary board, and the first notes were issued on the day independence was declared. The six issues since, and what the 1991 one replaced.
Wells and rainwater cisterns first, then barrels shipped from the Shatt al-Arab, then the 1953 distillation plant at Shuwaikh. What the method costs today.
Regag or Iranian bread torn and soaked in a rich broth with lamb or chicken and vegetables. Where it came from, and how it reached modern menus.
The small tidal berths came first, then an unpaved anchorage, then Shuwaikh in the 1950s, Shuaiba for industry, Doha for light cargo, and a container terminal on Bubiyan.
