In the streets of Paris, full of its old stone houses, during an academic visit to France in 2008, my PhD thesis mentor, a Tibetan professor with good background of life and academic involvement in Europe, expressed his longtime held admiration for the prevalence of stone as building material in the continent, so much more perdurable than the wood traditionally used in Tibet, China, Japan…, where historically a royal palace had all chances to succumb to fire, to the ground, sooner or later.
