Irkutsk
Wooden Lace to Baikal
Portrait
Irkutsk grew on the tea and fur trade with China and on the exiled Decembrists, whose houses are museums; its carved wooden façades — window frames like lace — survive in whole streets. Baikal holds a fifth of the world's unfrozen fresh water, is 1,642 metres deep, and has some 1,700 species found nowhere else, including a freshwater seal.