The Most Beautiful Film Locations in Asia
27 places in 16 countries · updated 13 October 2026
In short: By our ranking, the most beautiful film locations in Asia are Taipei 101 (Taiwan), Petronas Towers (Malaysia) and Lake Baikal (Russia). The list covers 27 film locations in 16 countries. Turkey has the most, with 4. Last updated 13 October 2026.
Asia offers film-makers extremes that exist nowhere else: the highest mountains on Earth, the deepest lake, the lowest shore, rose-red cities cut into cliffs and temples swallowed by jungle. Some of these places are so remote that a film crew's journey there is an expedition in itself; others, like the glass towers of the new Asian metropolis, have become shorthand for the future. Either way, the camera gets something no set designer could invent.
Adventure cinema made several of them famous. Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade rides up the narrow Siq of Petra to the carved facade of the Treasury, and Lara Croft: Tomb Raider explored the temples of Angkor, where tree roots grip the stones. The abandoned coal-mining island of Hashima, off Nagasaki, inspired the villain's ruined lair in Skyfall. Istanbul's Hagia Sophia, a Byzantine church later turned mosque, appears in the Bond film From Russia with Love.
Modern Asia plays its part too. The twin Petronas Towers in Kuala Lumpur, linked by a sky bridge, frame the climax of Entrapment, and Taipei 101, once the tallest building in the world, rises like a stack of bamboo segments above Taipei. Nature supplies the rest: Mount Everest, subject of countless documentaries and the 2015 drama Everest; the ice-bound winter surface of Lake Baikal; the salt-crusted shore of the Dead Sea; the shadow of Nanga Parbat; and the Crusader stronghold of Krak des Chevaliers, which looks as if it were built for an epic.
In this list
| # | Place | Type | Country | UNESCO |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Taipei 101 | Skyscraper | Taiwan | |
| 2 | Petronas Towers | Skyscraper | Malaysia | |
| 3 | Lake Baikal | Lake | Russia | ✓ |
| 4 | Hashima Island | Abandoned mine | Japan | ✓ |
| 5 | Mount Everest | Mountain | Nepal | |
| 6 | Dead Sea | Lake | Israel | |
| 7 | Krak des Chevaliers | Castle | Syria | ✓ |
| 8 | Angkor Wat | Archaeological site | Cambodia | ✓ |
| 9 | Petra | Archaeological site | Jordan | ✓ |
| 10 | Lake Khövsgöl | Lake | Mongolia | |
| 11 | Hagia Sophia | Mosque | Turkey | ✓ |
| 12 | Nanga Parbat | Summit | Pakistan | |
| 13 | Forbidden City | Palace | People's Republic of China | ✓ |
| 14 | Burj Khalifa | Skyscraper | United Arab Emirates | |
| 15 | Sultan Ahmed Mosque | Mosque | Turkey | ✓ |
| 16 | Taj Mahal | Mausoleum | India | ✓ |
| 17 | Topkapı Palace | Palace | Turkey | ✓ |
| 18 | Huangshan | Protected area | People's Republic of China | ✓ |
| 19 | Wadi Rum | Protected area | Jordan | ✓ |
| 20 | Red Square | Square | Russia | ✓ |
| 21 | Pashupatinath Temple | Temple | Nepal | ✓ |
| 22 | Süleymaniye Mosque | Mosque | Turkey | ✓ |
| 23 | Kremlin | Fortress | Russia | ✓ |
| 24 | Swayambhunath | Stupa | Nepal | ✓ |
| 25 | Jaisalmer Fort | Fortress | India | ✓ |
| 26 | Sakurajima | Volcano | Japan | |
| 27 | Hatra | Archaeological site | Iraq | ✓ |
01 Taipei 101
Taiwan · 0.4 km from Taipei25.034° N 121.565° E
Image by george17168 from Pixabay The single most photographed part of Taipei 101 isn't visible from the street. Between the 87th and 92nd floors hangs a bright yellow steel sphere weighing 660 tonnes — the largest tuned mass damper ever installed in a building, and one of the few designed to be seen rather than hidden.
Did you know? In January 2026 Alex Honnold climbed the outside of the tower without ropes in about an hour and a half, in an authorised free solo.
02 Petronas Towers
Malaysia · 3.2 km from Kuala Lumpur3.158° N 101.712° E
Image by Pexels from Pixabay 9 metres. The Argentine-American architect César Pelli designed them for the Malaysian state oil company. He deliberately drew on Islamic geometry: each tower's floor plan is an eight-pointed star made of two overlapping squares, with rounded lobes fitted into the angles to gain office space. The steel and glass cladding repeats the pattern as it steps up towards the spires.
Did you know? Climber Alain Robert was stopped at the 60th floor in 1997 and again ten years later, before scaling Tower Two barehanded in 2009.
03 Lake Baikal
Russia53.303° N 108.005° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
- UNESCO natural beauty
Image by Peggy_Marco from Pixabay Baikal holds roughly a fifth of all the unfrozen fresh water on Earth's surface — more than all five of North America's Great Lakes combined — despite a surface area that's a fraction of theirs, because the lake plunges to a maximum depth of about 1,642 metres, deeper than almost any point on the ocean floor within a thousand kilometres of shore.
Did you know? About 330 rivers flow into Baikal, yet only one, the Angara, flows out of it.
04 Hashima Island
Japan · 20.5 km from Nagasaki32.628° N 129.738° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by JordyMeow from Pixabay Hashima, better known as Gunkanjima or Battleship Island, is a scrap of rock about 15 km from the centre of Nagasaki that was turned into one of the most densely populated places ever recorded. 3 hectares. Encased in its concrete walls and packed with tower blocks, the island looked from the sea like a warship, and the nickname came from its resemblance to the battleship Tosa.
Did you know? Exterior shots of the island appear in the 2012 James Bond film Skyfall, and it was a filming location for the live-action Attack on Titan.
05 Mount Everest
Nepal27.988° N 86.925° E
Image by peteranta from Pixabay 86 metres. No point on Earth stands higher above sea level. Nepalis call the mountain Sagarmatha; Tibetans call it Qomolangma, a name that already appears on a Qing imperial atlas of 1721. The English name came from Andrew Waugh, Surveyor General of India, who honoured his predecessor George Everest, even though Everest himself protested that the natives of India could neither write nor pronounce it.
Did you know? More than 200 bodies remain on the mountain because bringing them down from such altitudes is considered too dangerous.
06 Dead Sea
Israel · 38.9 km from Jerusalem31.521° N 35.484° E
Image by mirkosajkov from Pixabay The Dead Sea's basic party trick — you cannot sink in it — comes down to raw density. 24 kg per liter, dense enough that a human body floats almost involuntarily.
Did you know? At about 304 metres deep, the Dead Sea is the deepest hypersaline lake in the world.
07 Krak des Chevaliers
Syria · 38.9 km from Homs34.757° N 36.295° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by Iyad from Pixabay Krak des Chevaliers sits on a 650-metre spur at the southern end of Syria's coastal mountains, watching over the Homs Gap, the one easy corridor between the port of Tripoli and the inland city of Homs. The site was already fortified in 1031, when the Mirdasid emir of Aleppo stationed Kurdish troops here, which is why Arabic sources still call it Hisn al-Akrad, the fort of the Kurds.
Did you know? T. E. Lawrence judged it possibly the best-preserved and most admirable castle anywhere in the world.
08 Angkor Wat
Cambodia · 5.4 km from Siem Reap13.412° N 103.867° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by The_5ifth from Pixabay Angkor Wat is the largest religious monument on Earth and the one building every Cambodian knows. It appears on the national flag. King Suryavarman II commissioned it in the first half of the 12th century as the state temple of his capital, Yaśodharapura, and dedicated it to Vishnu. It was most likely also intended as his mausoleum.
Did you know? The temple was built from an estimated five to ten million sandstone blocks, the heaviest weighing about 1.5 tonnes.
09 Petra
Jordan · 32.1 km from Ma'an30.329° N 35.442° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by StockSnap from Pixabay For centuries Petra existed mainly in local Bedouin knowledge and old texts, unseen by European travelers, until the Swiss explorer Johann Ludwig Burckhardt talked his way in in 1812 by posing as a Muslim pilgrim — the disguise mattered because outsiders weren't otherwise let anywhere near the site.
Did you know? The Monastery, Ad Deir, is the largest monument at Petra, about 45 metres tall and 50 metres wide.
10 Lake Khövsgöl
Mongolia51.100° N 100.500° E
Bernard Gagnon · CC0 Lake Khövsgöl is a long blade of exceptionally clear water laid across the far north of Mongolia, 1,645 metres above sea level and only a short distance from the Russian border. It stretches about 136 km from north to south and is at most some 36 km wide, covering roughly 2,760 km². 4 percent of all the fresh water on the planet. Only Uvs Lake is larger in surface area within the country.
Did you know? Mongolians call the lake "Mother Sea", and it is also known as the Khövsgöl Sea.
11 Hagia Sophia
Ayasofya
Turkey · 1.1 km from Istanbul41.008° N 28.980° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by edibejko from Pixabay The building that stands today was put up in barely five years. In January 532 the Nika riots burned down the previous church on the site, and within weeks Emperor Justinian I had started a far more ambitious replacement, designed by two scholars rather than master masons: Anthemius of Tralles, a mathematician, and Isidore of Miletus, a geometer. It was dedicated in 537.
Did you know? Envoys of the Kievan Rus' prince reported that inside they could not tell whether they were in heaven or on earth, a verdict tied to Rus' conversion to Orthodoxy.
12 Nanga Parbat
Pakistan35.239° N 74.590° E
Image by Makalu from Pixabay Nanga Parbat, 8,126 m, is the ninth-highest mountain in the world and the western cornerstone of the Himalaya, rising just south of the great bend of the Indus in Gilgit-Baltistan, in the Pakistan-administered part of Kashmir. Few mountains stand so far above their surroundings.
Did you know? Guinness World Records lists it as the fastest-growing mountain on Earth, rising by about 7 mm a year.
13 Forbidden City
People's Republic of China · 1.6 km from Beijing39.916° N 116.391° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
N509FZ · CC BY-SA 4.0 For almost five centuries the Forbidden City was the physical centre of the Chinese state. The Yongle Emperor of the Ming dynasty began it in 1406, after moving the capital from Nanjing to Beijing, and the complex was ready by 1420; from then until 1912 twenty-four emperors, fourteen Ming and ten Qing, lived and ruled here.
Did you know? The Last Emperor of 1987 was the first feature film the People's Republic of China ever allowed to be shot inside the palace.
14 Burj Khalifa
United Arab Emirates · 2.3 km from Dubai25.197° N 55.274° E
Image by JESHOOTS-com from Pixabay 8 metres to the tip of its spire, the Burj Khalifa has been the tallest building on Earth since it opened in January 2010, taking the title from Taipei 101. It rises out of Downtown Dubai beside Sheikh Zayed Road, and it was conceived less as an office tower than as the anchor of an entire new district: the Dubai Mall, an artificial lake, hotels and residential blocks were all planned around it.
Did you know? During Ramadan, residents above the 150th floor break their fast a few minutes later than those at street level, because they see the sun set later.
15 Sultan Ahmed Mosque
Turkey · 1.4 km from Istanbul41.005° N 28.977° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by OWPictures from Pixabay Sultan Ahmed I commissioned this at just 19 years old, and it was built between 1609 and 1616 — a low point in Ottoman fortunes, coming right after an unfavorable peace ended a long war with Persia. An imperial mosque of this scale was, among other things, a calculated show of confidence: proof the empire hadn't actually faltered. Ahmed died the year after it was finished, at 27.
Did you know? The tile orders swallowed the entire İznik industry, and in 1613 the sultan banned making or selling tiles for anyone else until his were finished.
16 Taj Mahal
India · 2.9 km from Agra27.175° N 78.042° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Taj_Mahal,_Agra,_India_edit2.jpg : Yann ; edited by King of Hearts derivative work: Jbarta ( talk ) · CC BY-SA 3.0 Shah Jahan began building this in 1631 as a tomb for his wife, Mumtaz Mahal, who had died giving birth to their fourteenth child.
Did you know? Its four minarets, each over 40 metres tall, lean slightly outward so that if one ever collapsed it would fall away from the tomb.
17 Topkapı Palace
Turkey · 1 km from Istanbul41.013° N 28.984° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by falco from Pixabay For almost four centuries the Ottoman Empire was governed from a headland at the very tip of old Istanbul. Mehmed II began Topkapı Palace in 1459, a few years after taking Constantinople, on Seraglio Point, where the Golden Horn opens into the Bosphorus and both meet the Sea of Marmara.
Did you know? The palace stands on the site of the acropolis of ancient Byzantion, and parts of its outer walls date back to Byzantine times.
18 Huangshan
People's Republic of China30.125° N 118.167° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
- UNESCO natural beauty
Image by 12412158 from Pixabay Huangshan's peaks are granite, not the limestone karst that shapes so much of scenic China, and that matters: granite fractures into sheer, blocky faces rather than smooth curves, which is why the mountain reads as a forest of vertical spires rather than rolling hills.
Did you know? Some 60,000 stone steps have been cut into the mountain, and nobody knows exactly when the oldest of them were laid.
19 Wadi Rum
Jordan · 33.6 km from Aqaba29.576° N 35.420° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
- UNESCO natural beauty
Image by mailanmaik from Pixabay Wadi Rum is a desert valley in the far south of Jordan, east of Aqaba near the Saudi border, where sheer mountains of sandstone and granite rise out of flat floors of red and apricot sand. Covering about 720 square kilometres, it is the largest wadi in the country.
Did you know? Wadi Rum has stood in for several fictional worlds: Jedha in Rogue One, Pasaana in The Rise of Skywalker and Arrakis in Dune.
20 Red Square
Russia · 0.4 km from Moscow55.754° N 37.620° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by joneybrain from Pixabay Red Square is a long rectangle — about 330 metres from end to end — laid along the eastern wall of the Moscow Kremlin, where the fortress had no river to protect it. That weakness is the square's origin: in the 1490s Ivan III ordered the ground outside the wall cleared of buildings to open a field of fire, and a deep moat was dug in front of the wall in the early sixteenth century.
Did you know? The square covers about 73,000 square metres, some 330 metres long and roughly 70 metres wide.
21 Pashupatinath Temple
Nepal · 3.5 km from Kathmandu27.710° N 85.349° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by bijayyadav from Pixabay Pashupatinath is the most important Hindu temple in Nepal and one of the holiest Shiva shrines anywhere, the destination of pilgrims from across South Asia. It stands on the banks of the Bagmati river on the eastern side of Kathmandu, where a temple is recorded as early as 400 AD.
Did you know? The name Pashupati means lord of animals, one of the epithets of Shiva, who is worshipped here as protector of all living beings.
22 Süleymaniye Mosque
Turkey · 0.9 km from Istanbul41.016° N 28.964° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by fotos1992 from Pixabay The Süleymaniye crowns Istanbul's Third Hill, and from the water its silhouette — a great central dome shouldered by cascading half-domes and four slender minarets — is one of the defining outlines of the old city's skyline. It was built for Suleiman the Magnificent by his chief architect Mimar Sinan; the inscription over the entrance gives 1550 for the foundation and 1557 for the inauguration.
Did you know? Sinan is said to have channelled the smoke of the mosque's oil lamps into a chamber above the entrance, where the soot was gathered and turned into calligraphers' ink.
23 Kremlin
Russia · 0.4 km from Moscow55.752° N 37.618° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by dondelord from Pixabay The Moscow Kremlin is a walled citadel on Borovitsky Hill, where the Neglinnaya once flowed into the Moskva River. It has been the seat of Russian power, with interruptions, for most of the last seven centuries. A timber fort stood here in the 12th century. Ivan I rebuilt it in oak in 1339, and Dmitry Donskoy replaced that with white limestone in the 1360s.
Did you know? The 202-tonne Tsar Bell has never rung: water thrown on it during a 1737 fire cracked it and broke off a slab weighing over 10 tonnes.
24 Swayambhunath
Nepal · 2.5 km from Kathmandu27.715° N 85.290° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Vyacheslav Argenberg · CC BY 4.0 Swayambhunath crowns a wooded hill just west of Kathmandu, and from almost anywhere in the valley you can see its white dome and gilded spire, painted on all four sides with the half-closed eyes of the Buddha. For the Newar Buddhists of the valley it is one of their three holiest sites, for Tibetan Buddhists second only to Boudhanath, and Hindus worship here too.
Did you know? According to local legend, the temple's monkeys descended from lice in the long hair of the bodhisattva Manjushri.
25 Jaisalmer Fort
India26.913° N 70.913° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by DEZALB from Pixabay Jaisalmer Fort is one of the very few living forts in the world. Roughly a quarter of the old city's population still lives inside its walls, some 4,000 people, many descended from the Brahmin and Rajput families who once served the Bhati rulers and earned the right to live on the hilltop.
Did you know? The fort's Jain library holds the earliest known painted palm-leaf manuscript, a copy of the Oghaniryukti dated 1060.
26 Sakurajima
Japan · 9.2 km from Kagoshima31.581° N 130.658° E
Image by tsunehachi from Pixabay Sakurajima is a volcano that lives in the middle of a city's view. It rises from Kagoshima Bay just 4 km across the water from Kagoshima, a city of some 680,000 people, and it is the most active volcano in Japan: since 1955 it has erupted almost continuously, with thousands of small explosions a year throwing ash kilometres into the sky.
Did you know? Between 1955 and 2024 observers counted more than 15,000 eruptions from the Minami-dake and Showa craters alone.
27 Hatra
Iraq35.588° N 42.718° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Lance Cpl. Albert F. Hunt, U.S. Marine Corps · Public domain On the open steppe of northern Mesopotamia, the vaulted halls and columned temple fronts of Hatra still rise out of a ring of ancient walls. Some 1,800 years ago this was a fortified caravan city on the frontier between Rome and Parthia, and its ruins are regarded as the richest site of the Parthian era known today. Hatra has been a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1985.
Did you know? Only three years before its fall, Hatra's forces defeated the rising Sasanian Persians at the battle of Shahrazoor in 238.
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 film locations in Asia?
- On our list, Taipei 101 (Taiwan) ranks first, followed by Petronas Towers (Malaysia) and Lake Baikal (Russia).
- Which country has the most film locations in Asia?
- In our collection, the most come from Turkey (4), Nepal (3) and Russia (3).
- Which Indiana Jones film was shot at Petra?
- Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989). The heroes ride through the Siq to the Treasury, Al-Khazneh, whose facade stands in for the entrance to the temple of the Holy Grail.
- Why is Hashima Island called Battleship Island?
- Hashima, off Nagasaki, was covered with concrete sea walls and apartment blocks for its coal miners, and its silhouette came to resemble a warship. The mine closed in 1974 and the island was abandoned.
- Was Tomb Raider filmed at Angkor?
- Yes. Lara Croft: Tomb Raider (2001) shot scenes at Angkor in Cambodia, most famously at Ta Prohm, where giant tree roots grow over the temple walls.
- How many film locations are on this list in Asia?
- The list covers 27 film locations in 16 countries. Turkey has the most, with 4.