This week we visit places “on the edge,” where different musics meet. The first is on the Silk Road, the land route from China to Europe through Central Asia. In the early seventeenth century CE, in Xi’an in Western China, Chinese officials found a stone inscribed in the Chinese and Syriac languages (the Nestorian Stele) that dated back to the Tang Dynasty a thousand years before. This discovery, which soon made its way to Jesuit missionaries in Beijing, triggered a bizarre misunderstanding (“whacked out” is the word we use!) in Europe about the “musical” nature of the Chinese language. Our second “postcard” takes us to the Pacific Ocean and the cosmopolitan world of the whaling ship, a floating factory where people, cetaceans, death, extraction, and music came together in a special soundscape.