The Registan is a square in the middle of Samarkand, in Uzbekistan, faced on three sides by madrasahs — Islamic colleges sheathed in tile — and above the portal of one of them two tigers are hunting. Islamic custom does not put living things on a house of prayer, and nobody is certain why the builder dared. The beasts are golden-maned, each with a sun rising off its back, and they gave the Sher-Dor its name. The oldest of the three colleges was founded by a man better remembered for astronomy than for ruling. Ulugh Beg, Timur's grandson, built an observatory in the city, catalogued more than a thousand stars with an accuracy nothing matched until the telescope, and lectured on mathematics inside these walls; he was killed on his own son's orders. The Sher-Dor went up two centuries later as the mirror of his college, and the Tilya-Kori closed the square between them.
Close up the tilework stops being pattern and becomes labour. Every shape you are looking at in the turquoise, lapis and gold is a separate piece of cut, glazed ceramic, set by hand. Through each great portal you come into a quiet courtyard ringed by two tiers of arched cells where students lodged. Inside the Tilya-Kori the mosque is gold from floor to ceiling, and the ceiling is built from tier upon tier of small honeycomb niches, each stepping inward and upward, so the whole of it glows above you. For a small tip a guard will unlock a narrow, unlit spiral stair and let you climb a minaret over the three portals and the domes beyond. One of those minarets leaned for years until Soviet engineers pulled it upright in 1932 without taking the tower down. As the sun drops the three fronts go from honey to deep gold and the floodlights lift them out of the dark. Two readings of the tigers survive: the governor's own badge of power, or an echo of sun-worship older than Islam in Central Asia. Neither has ever been settled.