Posted Monday, July 31, 2006; 20:00 HKT

Michael Schuman was on his way to Oyu Tolgoi, a spot in the Gobi Desert that he describes as "the definition of the middle of nowhere," when the winds kicked in. By the time he got to the mining camp for which he was heading, a full-scale sandstorm was raging. But he learned something from the experience; the gers—circular tents—that the local nomads live in, says Schuman, are engineered so smartly that they just rocked in the wind.

Schuman was in Mongolia, the ancestral home of a dynasty that once ruled half the known world, and to whose court in Shangdu—that's Xanadu, for those who love Samuel Taylor Coleridge's poem—three merchants of Venice traveled in 1275. The youngest, Marco Polo, later wrote what remains the best-known travel book of all time. For this year's Summer Journey double issue, we revisited Marco Polo's trail, not as a geographical exercise, but as a way of exploring the key dynamic of our time—the way in which East and West now meet each other. Our reporters constantly bumped into echoes of the old Venetian. In China's western province of Xinjiang, says Hannah Beech, "everyone seemed to know who Marco Polo was. They acted as if he was an Italian guy who had come through town just the other day. I'd meet people who'd say, 'Oh yeah, Marco used to eat these kinds of melons.'"

For us, the project was a voyage of intellectual discovery. The contact between East and West, says Peter Gumbel, who wrote our opening essay, "is never banal—on both sides, perceptions remain shrouded in a cloud of exoticism, misunderstanding and prejudice." Andrew Marshall, who retraced Polo's sail through the Malacca Strait, provided a perfect example. "We live in an age where orthodox Islam and global capitalism are considered polar opposites," he says. "But my travels reminded me that it was Muslim merchants—Muslim capitalists—who did so much to spread Islam throughout the region."

The Summer Journey issue calls on the full range of skills of our correspondents, and of regular contributors, such as Pico Iyer. I'd long assumed that there was no nation on earth Pico hadn't visited, only to discover that he'd never been to Sri Lanka—so that's where we sent him. (In typical Pico style, he bumped into a classmate from school days, 35 years ago.) To make the double issue look as great as it can, we also used some of TIME's regular photographers; this year we feature tremendous portfolios by John Stanmeyer, who accompanied Marshall, and Yuri Kozyrev, who captured the mystery of Uzbekistan. The issue was edited—and the whole project masterminded—by Zoher Abdoolcarim, a senior editor based in Hong Kong. International art director

Cecelia Wong designed the pages, working with Dennis Wong, our graphic designer and cartographer. Picture editors Lisa Botos and Maria Wood worked ceaselessly to get the best images we could find, while associate editor Hanna Kite and reporter Toko Sekiguchi handled the traffic, checked the facts, and made sure that the editors didn't slack on the job. I'm grateful to all of them for months of hard work, and trust that you enjoy our rediscovery of Marco Polo's journey—and what it tells us about our own times, and our own world.