The Most Beautiful City Parks in Asia
8 places in 3 countries · updated 13 October 2026
In short: By our ranking, the most beautiful city parks in Asia are Yu Garden (People's Republic of China), Gardens by the Bay (Singapore) and Shinjuku Gyoen (Japan). The list covers 8 city parks in 3 countries. Japan has the most, with 5. Last updated 13 October 2026.
Asian cities have some of the oldest garden traditions in the world and some of the most inventive modern ones. Chinese scholar gardens compress mountains, lakes and pavilions into a single walled plot, and Japanese culture has built a calendar around flowers, from plum and cherry in spring to wisteria, lavender and the red leaves of autumn. Modern cities have carried that care for planting into a new scale, turning parks into seasonal events that draw visitors in their millions.
Yu Garden in Shanghai, laid out in the Ming dynasty, is a maze of rockeries, ponds and halls around the Exquisite Jade Rock, a pitted stone prized for its shape. Gardens by the Bay in Singapore answers it with steel and glass: tree-like vertical gardens called Supertrees and two great conservatories, one holding a misty indoor mountain and waterfall. Shinjuku Gyoen in Tokyo, once an imperial garden, combines Japanese, French formal and English landscape gardens and is one of the city's favourite places for cherry blossom.
The rest of the list follows the bloom. Hitachi Seaside Park covers its hills with blue nemophila in spring and red kochia in autumn. Farm Tomita in Furano lays stripes of lavender across the Hokkaido countryside, and Ashikaga Flower Park spreads a single great wisteria over a vast trellis. Kawachi Wisteria Garden in Kitakyushu leads through tunnels of hanging flowers in shades of purple, pink and white. Dunhuang Yardang National Geopark is a different kind of park altogether, a desert of ridges carved by wind into the shapes of ruined towns and ships.
In this list
| # | Place | Type | Country | UNESCO |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Yu Garden | Urban park | People's Republic of China | |
| 2 | Gardens by the Bay | Urban park | Singapore | |
| 3 | Shinjuku Gyoen | Urban park | Japan | |
| 4 | Hitachi Seaside Park | Urban park | Japan | |
| 5 | Farm Tomita | Urban park | Japan | |
| 6 | Ashikaga Flower Park | Urban park | Japan | |
| 7 | Kawachi Wisteria Garden | Urban park | Japan | |
| 8 | Dunhuang Yardang National Geopark | Urban park | People's Republic of China |
01 Yu Garden
People's Republic of China · 5.2 km from Shanghai31.229° N 121.487° E
Chainwit. · CC BY 4.0 The garden's centerpiece, the Grand Rockery, is a deliberately engineered mountain: a twelve-metre-high formation built from 2,000 tons of yellow stone hauled from Zhejiang province, each piece bonded to the next with a mortar of rice glue and limestone rather than modern cement, attributed to the renowned Ming garden designer Zhang Nanyang.
Did you know? Pan Yunduan's diaries from 1586 to 1601 show that nearly three-quarters of entries concern performances staged in the garden.
02 Gardens by the Bay
Singapore · 1.8 km from Singapore1.283° N 103.865° E
Shiny Things . · CC BY 2.0 The whole 101-hectare park sits on land that didn't exist a few decades ago — reclaimed from the sea as part of Singapore's long-running program of expanding its usable land area, and given over entirely to a garden rather than housing or industry, which for a small island nation with some of the highest land values on earth is itself a statement of priorities.
Did you know? Inside the Cloud Forest dome stands a 42-metre 'Cloud Mountain' clad in orchids and ferns, with a 35-metre indoor waterfall that the descending path crosses again and again.
03 Shinjuku Gyoen
Japan · 3.5 km from Tokyo35.687° N 139.711° E
Kakidai · CC BY-SA 3.0 The redesign was the work of Henri Martinet, a French landscape architect, and it explains why the park feels like three gardens stitched together. In the north there is a symmetrical French formal garden and an English landscape garden of broad lawns and loose groups of trees; in the south lies a traditional Japanese garden of ponds, islands, bridges and clipped shrubs, with a traditional tea house. The Taiwan Pavilion, built in the southern Chinese Minnan style and given in 1927 by the Japanese community in Taiwan to mark the wedding of the then Crown Prince Hirohito, is among the few structures that survived the air raids of 1945, which burned most of the garden.
Did you know? Since 1952 Japan's prime minister has hosted an invitation-only cherry blossom viewing party in the garden each spring.
04 Hitachi Seaside Park
Japan · 10.5 km from Mito36.401° N 140.591° E
Image by nyan8 from Pixabay The ground was not always a garden. Before the park, the land was the Mito East airfield, later used by the US Air Force as a bombing range. Planning to turn it into a public park began in 1979, construction in 1984, and the first 70 hectares opened in October 1991. Today the park covers around 350 hectares, and the hill is only one of its seasonal pictures: around a million daffodils open from mid-March, more than 170 varieties of tulips follow in late April, and cosmos colour the fields later in the year.
Did you know? About 4.5 million nemophila bloom on the hill each spring, their translucent petals giving the slope its pale, sky-like tint.
05 Farm Tomita
Japan · 37.5 km from Asahikawa43.419° N 142.427° E
t-konno · CC BY-SA 3.0 Its story begins with settlers. Tokuma Tomita came to Hokkaido among the wave of migrants from Honshu who arrived after an 1897 law opened the island's uncultivated land, and in 1903 he started clearing the ground in what is now Nakafurano. His grandson Tadao Tomita began growing lavender for perfume oil in 1958, at a time when the crop was spreading across the Furano district, which at its peak had more than 230 hectares of lavender and over 250 growing households. From around 1972, as trade was liberalised and cheaper synthetic fragrances took over, the market collapsed, and by the following year Farm Tomita was almost the only lavender grower left in the area.
Did you know? After lavender demand collapsed, the farm kept the fields going by turning to its own products, obtaining a licence to make soap in 1987.
06 Ashikaga Flower Park
Japan36.315° N 139.522° E
ja:User:京浜にけ · CC BY-SA 3.0 The park traces its beginnings to the 1920s, when a landowner in Ashikaga planted a wisteria in a corner of his garden. In 1968 the family opened the garden so that local people could enjoy the vine in bloom, as Hayakawa Farm, the forerunner of today's park. As the town grew up around the site, the decision was taken to move the plants, and in February 1996 four great wisteria, each then well over a century old, were transplanted to the present grounds, a former wetland of about 8 hectares crossed by ponds and creeks.
Did you know? The four transplanted giants are three long-raceme Noda wisteria and one double-flowered dark purple vine known as Yae-kokuryū.
07 Kawachi Wisteria Garden
Japan · 5 km from Kitakyūshū33.832° N 130.792° E
そらみみ (Soramimi) · CC BY-SA 4.0 The garden is private and was opened in April 1977 by Higuchi Masao in the hills of Yahatahigashi ward, on the southern side of Kitakyushu. It covers roughly 10,000 square metres, and the area under blossom alone runs to about 6,000. Around twenty varieties are grown, from the long-tendrilled Noda wisteria to double-flowered and white forms, with azaleas planted among them. The garden also opens for a short season in late autumn, when some 700 maple trees around it, a number of them 70 to 80 years old, turn red.
Did you know? Higuchi Masao began clearing a wooded hillside for the garden with his eldest son in 1968, nearly a decade before it opened.
08 Dunhuang Yardang National Geopark
People's Republic of China40.531° N 93.064° E
- UNESCO Global Geopark
Dcpeets · CC BY-SA 4.0 The formations are yardangs, landforms shaped by wind erosion. Here they are cut from layers of silty clay and fine silt laid down in lakes and rivers during the Middle and Late Pleistocene. Over hundreds of thousands of years, wind laden with sand and occasional floods have stripped away the softer layers and left the harder ones standing, so that each ridge is streamlined in the direction of the prevailing wind. The yardang field of Dunhuang is considered the largest in China; the geopark covers about 400 square kilometres, extending some 25 km from east to west and 18 km from north to south.
Did you know? Two yardangs measured by scientists rise about 24 and 27 metres high, the larger stretching more than 110 metres in length.
How this list is ranked
Places are chosen for how they look, not for how famous they are: each one has its own description and a photograph credited to its author. The order is a single world ranking that weighs the beauty of the place in curated photography together with how widely it is documented — the number of language editions of its encyclopedia article and how often that article is read in a year. The list is rebuilt as places are added, so the order and the counts on this page are always current.
Questions people ask
- What are the most beautiful city parks in Asia?
- On our list, Yu Garden (People's Republic of China) ranks first, followed by Gardens by the Bay (Singapore) and Shinjuku Gyoen (Japan).
- Which country has the most city parks in Asia?
- In our collection, the most come from Japan (5), the People's Republic of China (2) and Singapore (1).
- What are the Supertrees at Gardens by the Bay?
- They are tree-shaped vertical gardens between about 25 and 50 metres tall, covered in ferns, bromeliads and other plants. Some collect rainwater or vent hot air from the conservatories, and a skyway links two of them.
- How old is the great wisteria at Ashikaga Flower Park?
- The great wisteria is more than 150 years old. It was moved to the park in 1996, and its branches are carried on a broad trellis held up by dozens of supports.
- What is a yardang?
- A yardang is a streamlined ridge of rock or compacted sediment carved by wind in a desert. At Dunhuang, rows of yardangs rise from the Gobi like the walls and towers of a ruined city.
- How many city parks are on this list in Asia?
- The list covers 8 city parks in 3 countries. Japan has the most, with 5.