Welcome to China! And to a new world for Architectural Record. Throughout its 113-year history, this magazine has featured work by American architects, and with increasing frequency, informative, inspirational, or provocative work by architects from around the world. With this issue, we literally take a great leap forward, not only embracing an entire nation’s work thematically, but also fundamentally altering and enlarging our own brief—as a publication and as an institution.

You should be able to tell the difference, power-packed and compressed as this issue needs to be. Here you will find our overview of architects and architecture in China, a dizzying attempt for so large a topic. Included is a rich spread of information: outlines of numerous new projects in planning that are transforming eastern Asia; profiles of talented younger designers, many of whom had been trained abroad and have returned to home and family with hip new sensibilities intact; and evidence of what it means for non-Chinese architects who seek work in the China market, and the price it demands.