Gaze out from the skyscrapers reaching for the clouds above Baku and four converging vistas describe the city's history. Wrapped around the fortified walls of the old medieval settlement are the elegant avenues and boulevards built during Azerbaijan's first oil rush. These ornamented, if now badly faded, monuments to late 19th- century European culture speak of the riches pumped from beneath the shores of the Caspian by the Nobel Brothers Petroleum Company. The almost Parisian enclave is encircled in turn, though, by the square-jawed architectural brutalism which marched into the city with Lenin's Soviet Union. Finally, the flimsy, rotting apartment blocks of the Brezhnev era bear vivid testimony to the hollow bravado of a failing economic system.

The new Azerbaijan punches through the old; the garish steel and glass towers that pay homage to the country's latest oil rush have no respect for the past. Baku is a desolate backwater-turned boom town, soon to be hit by what one resident western diplomat calls a "wall of money". Sleek Mercedes jostle for space on the capital's pot-holed streets with battered Ladas and Volgas, the designer boutiques strung along Nobel's corniche with impoverished street traders and half-starved strays. This former way station on Asia's silk road was a vital piece in the 19th-century game played out by Britain and Russia as they wrestled for control of the routes to India. Now Azerbaijan sits at the crossroads of another set of strategic power-plays.