Asia home to more than half of the human race, spans a geographic area that reaches from Pakistan and India in the west, across China and Mongolia to the north, extending to Japan in the east, and throughout Indonesia in the south. An area of over 8 million square miles supports three and a half billion people (Weightman 1); a true myriad of cultures, traditions and languages, Asia is nearly impossible to conceptualize as a single entity. Interspersed across this vast sweep of land and sea are many sovereign nations, a slew of religions, and nearly every geographical landscape imaginable.