Highlights of the year: Asia

Pascale Harter presents extracts from some of the year's most memorable dispatches from Asia. With stories from Martin Patience, examining why China's so obsessed with statistics and superlatives; Rahul Tandon, paying for advice on how to pass for a pushy Indian parent and get his child into one of Calcutta's best schools; Lucy Williamson, in the Seoul bureau, hosting a friend fleeing South Korea's rigid dress codes; and Kim Philley, watching ancestral spirits dance again in an animist festival in Mandalay, Burma.