Thant Myint-U's Where China Meets India is a vivid, searching, timely book about the remote region that is suddenly a geopolitical center of the world.

From their very beginnings, China and India have been walled off from each other: by the towering summits of the Himalayas, by a vast and impenetrable jungle, by hostile tribes and remote inland kingdoms stretching a thousand miles from Calcutta across Burma to the upper Yangtze River.

Soon this last great frontier will vanish--the forests cut down, dirt roads replaced by superhighways, insurgencies crushed--leaving China and India exposed to each other as never before. This basic shift in geography--as sudden and profound as the opening of the Suez Canal--will lead to unprecedented connections among the three billion people of Southeast Asia and the Far East.

What will this change mean? Thant Myint-U is in a unique position to know. Over the past few years he has traveled extensively across this vast territory, where high-speed trains and gleaming new shopping malls are now coming within striking distance of the last far-flung rebellions and impoverished mountain communities. And he has explored the new strategic centrality of Burma, where Asia's two rising, giant powers appear to be vying for supremacy.

At once a travelogue, a work of history, and an informed look into the future, Where China Meets India takes us across the fast-changing Asian frontier, giving us a masterful account of the region's long and rich history and its sudden significance for the rest of the world.