From the Kazakhs in the north to Pashtuns in Pakistan, over 100 ethnic groups call the storied lands of Asia home. Dominated by a harsh landscape, sweeps of desert and near desert riven by soaring mountain chains: the Hindu Kush, the Pamirs, the Safed Koh. Mountains mean life. Snowmelt feeds the rivers that support cities and farms. Asia's appeal is paradoxical: forbidding, but beckoning with the promise of history in the making as some of the youngest nations on earth struggle with political conflicts and an unkind landscape to carve their place in the chronicles of a new world.