As a journalist, writer, and cultural historian, I have followed Asia for all of my adult life and have lived the story for longer than that. I grew up in Indonesia, Taiwan, and the Philippines at a time when Asian poverty was as much a priority for global thinkers as African poverty is today. Asian population growth was seen as a crisis triggering global food and resource shortages. Today Asia remains the world’s most populous region but is also its wealthiest, representing 50 percent of global GDP. So what does this changing story mean? Hong Kong is perhaps the best city in the region to ask such questions. It’s a brand new city in most ways, and constantly reinventing itself. Even at its sleepiest, it was alive with adventurers, entrepreneurs, and artists and writers captured sometimes permanently by its buzz. Today it remains a crossroads and gateway, mainly for China, but equally for the rest of Asia and a world on its way to Asia. It’s a city on the frontier of globalization, and likely to remain so, making discoveries that leave all but a few of its counterparts far behind.