Writing an architectural history of Asia in the twentieth-first century is a daunting challenge, one that lies neither in a lack of evidence nor in the overwhelming diversity of data, but in the difficulty of identifying ‘‘Asia.’’ As a geographical body, Asia is vast: home to the world’s highest plateau, host of 1,400 languages, and possessor of nearly 18-million square miles of land and more than 30,000 islands. As a geo-cultural body whose boundaries have shifted continually during the past two centuries, Asia is also elusive. This mystifying continent, born of the Greek goddess Gaia, is reputed to be a foundation of civilizations, a crucible of antiquity, and a dream for those seeking extraordinariness. To write about the architecture of Asia, then, one cannot simply survey buildings erected exotically on Gaia’s flesh, nor can one simply cast a monolithic net of cultural representation over her diversified geo-body. To write about the architecture of Asia requires, instead, an intellectual expedition to examine why Asia’s political boundaries do not necessarily match its architectural contours, those oft-perpetuated characteristics of ‘‘Asian-ness,’’ complicated by several centuries of accumulated definitions of what Asia is, and what it is not. Any intellectual expedition through Asia is sure to be haunted by persistent historical ghosts.