The Most Beautiful Gardens, Parks and Forests in Asia
60 places in 18 countries · updated 14 October 2026
In short: By our ranking, the most beautiful gardens, parks and forests in Asia are Ha Long Bay (Vietnam), Valley of Flowers National Park (India) and Huanglong (People's Republic of China). The list covers 60 gardens, parks and forests in 18 countries. Japan has the most, with 18. Last updated 14 October 2026.
Asia holds two of the oldest garden traditions on earth. The Persian garden, divided by water channels into a paradise of four parts, spread from Iran to the Mughal courts of India, while Chinese and Japanese gardeners spent centuries recreating mountains, rivers and forests in miniature. Their models were real landscapes of extraordinary form: limestone karst eroded into towers, monsoon forests, and Himalayan valleys that bloom for a few weeks each summer.
Ha Long Bay in Vietnam is a field of limestone islands and pillars rising from green water. In Sichuan, Huanglong descends in thousands of travertine pools coloured by mineral deposits, and nearby Jiuzhaigou is known for its clear blue and green lakes and waterfalls. Wulingyuan in Hunan raises sandstone pillars by the thousand, and Huangshan pairs granite peaks with pines clinging to the rock and seas of cloud below.
The designed gardens are as distinct. The Fin Garden in Kashan is one of the classic Persian gardens, its springs feeding turquoise channels through a walled orchard. In Kyoto the Arashiyama bamboo grove closes overhead into a green tunnel. India's Valley of Flowers fills a high Himalayan valley with alpine meadows, Gunung Mulu in Borneo hides some of the largest cave chambers known, and Karakul in the Pamirs lies in a high basin thought to be an ancient impact crater.
In this list
| # | Place | Type | Country | UNESCO |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Ha Long Bay | Protected area | Vietnam | |
| 2 | Valley of Flowers National Park | National park | India | ✓ |
| 3 | Huanglong | Protected area | People's Republic of China | ✓ |
| 4 | Fin Garden | Historic garden | Iran | |
| 5 | Wulingyuan | Protected area | People's Republic of China | ✓ |
| 6 | Arashiyama Bamboo Grove | Forest | Japan | |
| 7 | Gunung Mulu National Park | National park | Malaysia | ✓ |
| 8 | Jiuzhaigou Valley | National park | People's Republic of China | ✓ |
| 9 | Seoraksan National Park | National park | South Korea | |
| 10 | Huangshan | Protected area | People's Republic of China | ✓ |
| 11 | Karakul Lake | Lake | Tajikistan | ✓ |
| 12 | Göreme National Park | Protected area | Turkey | ✓ |
| 13 | Wadi Rum | Protected area | Jordan | ✓ |
| 14 | Yu Garden | Urban park | People's Republic of China | |
| 15 | Longji Rice Terraces | Terraced fields | People's Republic of China | |
| 16 | Lena Pillars | Protected area | Russia | ✓ |
| 17 | Osaka Aquarium Kaiyukan | Public aquarium | Japan | |
| 18 | Gardens by the Bay | Urban park | Singapore | |
| 19 | Kenroku-en | Historic garden | Japan | |
| 20 | Zhangye Danxia Geopark | Protected area | People's Republic of China | |
| 21 | Shalamar Gardens | Historic garden | Pakistan | |
| 22 | Gobustan State Historical and Cultural Reserve | Protected area | Azerbaijan | ✓ |
| 23 | Tubbataha Reef | Coral reef | Philippines | ✓ |
| 24 | Honghe Hani Rice Terraces | Terraced fields | People's Republic of China | |
| 25 | Banaue Rice Terraces | Terraced fields | Philippines | |
| 26 | Kōraku-en | Historic garden | Japan | |
| 27 | Ein Gedi Nature Reserve | Oasis | Israel | |
| 28 | Shinjuku Gyoen | Urban park | Japan | |
| 29 | Singapore Zoo | Zoo | Singapore | |
| 30 | Dancing Forest | Forest | Russia |
01 Ha Long Bay
Vietnam · 12.4 km from Hạ Long20.900° N 107.200° E
- UNESCO natural beauty
Image by xuanduongvan87 from Pixabay The scenery is the drowned end of a karst landscape. The rock itself is hundreds of millions of years old, but the shapes are the work of roughly twenty million years of tropical rain dissolving it: clusters of cone-shaped hills in some parts of the bay, isolated towers standing alone in others. When sea levels rose, the valleys between them filled with water, leaving the summits as islands. Rain and waves have also hollowed out caves.
Did you know? Dau Be island at the mouth of the bay encloses six lakes inside its karst, including the Ba Ham lakes.
02 Valley of Flowers National Park
India30.730° N 79.618° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
- UNESCO natural beauty
- biosphere reserve
Naresh Chandra · CC BY-SA 4.0 The outside world learned of it by accident. In 1931 the British mountaineers Frank Smythe, Eric Shipton and R. L. Holdsworth lost their way returning from Kamet and came down into a valley full of flowers; Smythe gave it its English name and wrote a book about it. In 1939 the botanist Joan Margaret Legge, sent by Kew Gardens, fell to her death while collecting plants on its slopes, and her sister later put up a memorial near the spot.
Did you know? A Forest Research Institute survey in 1992 counted about 600 flowering plant species and 30 ferns in the valley and its surroundings.
03 Huanglong
People's Republic of China32.741° N 103.831° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
- UNESCO natural beauty
Image by ymyphoto from Pixabay The pools are the spectacle. Depending on depth, algae and light, the water shifts from turquoise and emerald to deep blue, amber and pale yellow, and the terrace walls themselves glint gold. The largest set, the Five-Colour Pools near the head of the valley at around 3,500 metres, packs hundreds of small basins into one hillside beneath snowy peaks.
Did you know? The Danyun Gorge, more than 1,000 metres deep, carries snowmelt from Mount Xuebaoding that feeds much of the area's water.
04 Fin Garden
Iran · 19.5 km from Kashan33.946° N 51.373° E
Fabienkhan · CC BY-SA 2.5 The source of all this is the Soleymaniyeh spring, fed by a qanat whose mother well lies some two kilometres upstream. The spring delivers an average of some 350 litres a second, enough to keep every channel, pool and jet of the garden running, and its steady murmur is the garden's real soundtrack. At the centre stands the pavilion, the kushk, the place from which the axes of water and trees are best read.
Did you know? The Kashan museum in its western section displays finds from Tepe Sialk, one of Iran's oldest settlements, as well as Chogha Zanbil and Hasanlu.
05 Wulingyuan
People's Republic of China29.346° N 110.467° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
- UNESCO natural beauty
Image by Vined from Pixabay The pillars were shaped over hundreds of millions of years: the sandstone was laid down in the Devonian period and then lifted by tectonic forces, and erosion by water carved it into separate columns. The scenic area covers about 690 square kilometres of the Wuling Mountains and is made up of four parts: Zhangjiajie National Forest Park, the Suoxi Valley and Tianzi Mountain nature reserves, and the more recently added Yangjiajie.
Did you know? Roughly the lower half of the Bailong Elevator shaft is buried inside the cliff, while the upper part is an exposed steel frame.
06 Arashiyama Bamboo Grove
Japan · 7.8 km from Kyoto35.009° N 135.667° E
Naokijp · CC BY-SA 4.0 The grove belongs to Sagano, the old district at the foot of the western hills, and it is woven into a landscape of temples and villas rather than standing alone as a forest.
Did you know? Neighbouring Tenryū-ji was founded in 1339 by the shogun Ashikaga Takauji to honour the memory of Emperor Go-Daigo, his former enemy.
07 Gunung Mulu National Park
Malaysia4.043° N 114.813° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
- UNESCO natural beauty
Nur Nafis Naim · CC BY-SA 4.0 The superlatives are real. Deer Cave has one of the largest cave passages known, 120 to 150 metres across. The Sarawak Chamber, discovered in 1980, is one of the largest underground chambers in the world, about 600 metres long and 415 wide. Clearwater Cave is the longest cave system in Southeast Asia, with more than 227 km of passages mapped.
Did you know? The Royal Geographical Society expedition of 1977–1978 put more than 100 scientists into the field, the largest such expedition Britain had ever sent abroad.
08 Jiuzhaigou Valley
People's Republic of China33.200° N 103.900° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
- UNESCO natural beauty
Image by HI-MXWG from Pixabay That seismic origin isn't just history; it's ongoing risk the park has had to live with directly. In August 2017, a magnitude-7 earthquake tore through the region and damaged several of the valley's signature features, including draining much of the water from what had been one of its clearest pools — the same kind of violent, sudden geology that built the place in the first place came back to reshape it.
Did you know? The valley is one of only three places in the world where the threatened Duke of Bedford's vole is known to live.
09 Seoraksan National Park
South Korea · 17.9 km from Sokcho38.125° N 128.416° E
kallerna · CC BY-SA 4.0 The best-known silhouette is Ulsanbawi, a long, crenellated wall of granite rising above the eastern valley; reaching the top means a climb that ends on a staircase of roughly 888 steps, and from there the view runs down to Sokcho and the East Sea. Further inside, Gongnyongneungseon, the "Dinosaur Ridge", is a knife-edge of jagged spires that takes most of a day to traverse and is protected as one of Korea's scenic sites.
Did you know? According to legend, the fortress of Gwongeumseong was raised in a single day by two generals, Kwon and Kim, against the Mongol invasion of 1253.
10 Huangshan
People's Republic of China30.125° N 118.167° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
- UNESCO natural beauty
Image by 12412158 from Pixabay The pines are their own attraction, and their strangeness is easy to miss in photographs. Many grow directly out of bare granite, roots forced into cracks so narrow there's barely visible soil to speak of, twisting sideways along the rock to chase what little water and nutrient exists.
Did you know? The Huangshan pine is a species in its own right, Pinus hwangshanensis, named after the mountain where it clings to bare granite.
11 Karakul Lake
Tajikistan39.040° N 73.420° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
- UNESCO natural beauty
Image by Makalu from Pixabay A peninsula reaching out from the southern shore and an island off the northern shore divide the lake into two very different basins. The eastern one is shallow, about 13 to 19 metres deep, while the western basin plunges to around 230 metres. Karakul has no outlet, and its water is brackish; after the last ice age its level stood some 35 metres higher than today. Only one species of fish, a loach of the genus Triplophysa, lives in it.
Did you know? Even in summer the water warms only to about 12 °C, and it is clear enough to see some 9 metres down.
12 Göreme National Park
Göreme Tarihî Millî Parkı
Turkey · 12.5 km from Nevşehir38.653° N 34.863° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
- UNESCO natural beauty
W. Bulach · CC BY-SA 4.0 What makes the valleys extraordinary is that people moved into the rock. From the 4th century small groups of hermits cut cells into the tuff, and over time these were linked into monastic communities with chapels, refectories and storerooms carved rather than built. The area around Göreme is said to have held some 400 churches.
Did you know? The Church with Sandals takes its name from two footprints painted beneath its Ascension scene, said to copy those in Jerusalem's Church of the Ascension.
13 Wadi Rum
Jordan · 33.6 km from Aqaba29.576° N 35.420° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
- UNESCO natural beauty
Image by mailanmaik from Pixabay People have passed through here for thousands of years, and they have left their mark on the rock. Petroglyphs of hunters and antelope, inscriptions in the scripts of ancient Arabia, and a small Nabataean temple excavated near Rum village all testify to an old route between Arabia and the Levant.
Did you know? Jabal Rum and Jabal Umm Ishrin, facing each other across the valley, are so close in height that they may differ by only about a metre.
14 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? According to legend, the Exquisite Jade Rock was meant for Emperor Huizong's palace garden but was salvaged from the Huangpu River after its boat sank.
15 Longji Rice Terraces
People's Republic of China25.755° N 110.133° E
Image by mercierzeng from Pixabay Work on the terraces is generally dated to the Yuan dynasty in the 13th–14th centuries, and the carving continued into the early Qing period. They are still farmed, and that is what keeps them alive. Two peoples tend the two best-known areas: Zhuang families around Ping'an, and Yao communities around Dazhai and Jinkeng.
Did you know? Huangluo village holds a Guinness World Record for the largest group of people with the longest hair, with dozens of women whose hair passes a metre.
16 Lena Pillars
Russia61.107° N 127.362° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
VasilyevaED · CC BY-SA 4.0 The single most striking layer is the Sinsk Biota, a reef ecosystem roughly ten million years older than Canada's famous Burgess Shale — and preserved by an unusual process called phosphatisation, which fossilises soft tissue in a level of detail that limestone rarely allows.
Did you know? Remains of woolly mammoth, steppe bison and woolly rhinoceros have been found within the protected area.
17 Osaka Aquarium Kaiyukan
Japan · 8 km from Osaka34.654° N 135.429° E
663highland · CC BY 2.5 What makes Kaiyukan remarkable is its idea rather than its size.
Did you know? The lowest three floors of the building are machine rooms and filtration plant, closed to the public.
18 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? The Cloud Forest recreates the cool, moist climate of tropical mountains between 1,000 and 3,000 metres above sea level.
19 Kenroku-en
Japan · 2 km from Kanazawa36.562° N 136.662° E
663highland · CC BY 2.5 The name was given in 1822 by Matsudaira Sadanobu, and means "garden of six attributes". It borrows a Chinese idea that a perfect landscape must unite six qualities that tend to cancel each other out: spaciousness and seclusion, artifice and antiquity, flowing water and wide views.
Did you know? A small stone pagoda in the garden is traditionally said to have been brought back from Korea by the warlord Kato Kiyomasa after the invasions of the 1590s.
20 Zhangye Danxia Geopark
People's Republic of China · 27.5 km from Zhangye38.916° N 100.133° E
Image by eltonjohn1973 from Pixabay The colours are a record of time. Over millions of years rivers and lakes laid down layer after layer of sandstone, siltstone and mudstone, each coloured by the minerals and climate of its age. Later the same tectonic forces that raised the Himalaya tilted and folded the layers, and wind and rare rain then carved them into ridges, towers and ravines.
Did you know? The geopark centres on Sunan, the only Yugur autonomous county in China, whose folk songs, costumes and weddings are listed as national intangible heritage.
21 Shalamar Gardens
Pakistan · 4.2 km from Lahore31.586° N 74.382° E
Muhammad Ashar · CC BY-SA 3.0 The plan is a charbagh, the Persian paradise garden divided into four by water channels and raised walkways, a form the Mughals inherited from the Timurid gardens of Central Asia and Iran. Shah Jahan's inspiration was closer to home: the Shalimar garden his father Jahangir had made in Kashmir.
Did you know? The twin Sawan and Bhadun pavilions take their names from the two months of the monsoon rains in the local calendar.
22 Gobustan State Historical and Cultural Reserve
Azerbaijan40.106° N 49.389° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Diego Delso · CC BY-SA 4.0 The carvings record a very different world. When the first were made, the climate was far wetter and the hills were grazed by wild cattle, horses, deer and goats. Hunters with bows, groups of dancers linked hand in hand, bulls, boats crewed by oarsmen, camel caravans and suns and stars cover the faces of fallen blocks and rock shelters, often with newer images cut over older ones.
Did you know? Rock art here peaked in the Bronze Age, between the 4th and 2nd millennia BC, though carving continued into medieval times.
23 Tubbataha Reef
Philippines8.953° N 119.868° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
- UNESCO natural beauty
Anna Varona · CC BY 4.0 This is a true atoll system, built on an extinct submarine volcano on the Cagayan Ridge: as the old volcanic islands sank, the corals kept growing towards the light. The result is a shallow reef top that ends abruptly in walls dropping more than 100 metres into blue water, and those walls are what divers come for.
Did you know? In 2005 the Greenpeace ship Rainbow Warrior ran aground here, damaging about 100 square metres of coral; Greenpeace blamed inaccurate charts and paid a fine.
24 Honghe Hani Rice Terraces
People's Republic of China23.117° N 102.738° E
Jialiang Gao , www.peace-on-earth.org · CC BY-SA 3.0 The terraces are the work of the Hani people, who have farmed these slopes for well over a thousand years, and their real achievement is a system rather than a view.
Did you know? Red rice is the main crop, and around 48 local rice varieties are still grown across the terraced counties.
25 Banaue Rice Terraces
Philippines16.935° N 121.135° E
Image by lester56 from Pixabay They were built and are still worked by the Ifugao, and the extraordinary thing about them is that they are a living system rather than a ruin. Water is gathered in the rainforest on the ridges above and led down through a network of channels from one paddy to the next, so that the forest, the terraces and the villages form a single landscape that only works as long as all three are tended.
Did you know? Harvest thanksgiving feasts are marked with bayah rice wine, rice cakes and betel nut.
26 Kōraku-en
Japan · 1.7 km from Okayama34.668° N 133.935° E
663highland · CC BY-SA 4.0 Ikeda Tsunamasa, daimyo of Okayama, ordered its construction in 1687, and the garden was completed in 1700. It was first called Kōen, the "later garden", because it was laid out after the castle; in 1871 it received its present name, which echoes a Confucian maxim that a ruler should worry before his people and take his pleasure after them.
Did you know? Under shogunate scrutiny the lords did not receive outside guests here; the first recorded visit was in 1830, when Ikeda Narutoshi hosted his father, the lord of Satsuma.
27 Ein Gedi Nature Reserve
Israel · 29.6 km from Hebron31.467° N 35.394° E
Radosław Botev · CC BY 3.0 pl The walk up Nahal David is the classic introduction: a path along the stream through shady vegetation to a series of cascades, ending at David's Falls dropping into a pool beneath the cliff. Nubian ibex move with startling ease over the rock faces, and rock hyraxes bask on the boulders by the path. The Arugot canyon is wilder and longer, its stream running between tall walls of pale stone.
Did you know? After Jerusalem fell in 70 CE, the oasis's prized balsam plantations were taken over directly by the Roman imperial treasury.
28 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.
Did you know? Before becoming a botanical garden, the former Naitō estate served from 1872 as an experimental agricultural station of the new Meiji government.
29 Singapore Zoo
Singapore · 11 km from Johor Bahru1.405° N 103.791° E
Aungphone · CC BY-SA 4.0 The zoo was the project of Ong Swee Law, then chairman of Singapore's Public Utilities Board, who saw a use for the forested land around the reservoir he was responsible for. It now keeps around 2,500 animals of some 300 species, a significant share of them threatened in the wild.
Did you know? Steve Irwin adopted Singapore Zoo as a sister zoo to his Australia Zoo and opened its Australian Outback exhibit in 2006.
30 Dancing Forest
Russia55.180° N 20.862° E
Savinov.M · CC BY-SA 4.0 The trees are not old. They were planted in 1961 to fix the loose sand of the dune, part of a long effort to stabilise the spit, and the contortions developed as they grew. Nobody has settled why this plot turned out so strange, while the same pines elsewhere grew straight.
Did you know? Unlike so-called drunken trees, which simply lean at odd angles, these pines are coiled into rings, hearts and spirals.
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 gardens, parks and forests in Asia?
- On our list, Ha Long Bay (Vietnam) ranks first, followed by Valley of Flowers National Park (India) and Huanglong (People's Republic of China).
- Which country has the most gardens, parks and forests in Asia?
- In our collection, the most come from Japan (18), the People's Republic of China (15) and India (3).
- What is a Persian garden?
- A Persian garden, or chahar bagh, is a walled garden divided into four parts by water channels, representing an earthly paradise. Several in Iran, including the Fin Garden in Kashan, are inscribed together as a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
- Why are the lakes of Jiuzhaigou and Huanglong so colourful?
- The water is unusually clear and carries dissolved calcium carbonate, which settles as travertine on the lake beds. Light reflecting off these pale deposits, algae and submerged wood gives the pools their blue, green and yellow tones.
- How was Ha Long Bay formed?
- Ha Long Bay is a drowned karst landscape: limestone hills were dissolved by water over millions of years, and rising seas later flooded the valleys between them, leaving the peaks as islands.
- How many gardens, parks and forests are on this list in Asia?
- The list covers 60 gardens, parks and forests in 18 countries. Japan has the most, with 18.