The Most Beautiful Historic Gardens in Asia
11 places in 6 countries · updated 13 October 2026
In short: By our ranking, the most beautiful historic gardens in Asia are Fin Garden (Iran), Kenroku-en (Japan) and Shalamar Gardens (Pakistan). The list covers 11 historic gardens in 6 countries. Japan has the most, with 5. Last updated 13 October 2026.
Asia gave the world several of its great garden traditions. The Persian garden, a walled enclosure divided by water channels into four parts, was an image of paradise in a dry land, and it travelled with the Mughals to Lahore and Kashmir. Chinese scholars built gardens that compressed mountains, lakes and forests into a few courtyards, and Japan developed both strolling gardens built around ponds and the austere dry gardens of Zen temples, where raked gravel stands for water.
The Fin Garden in Kashan is one of the oldest surviving Persian gardens, its spring-fed channels running between cypresses to pavilions, and Shazdeh Garden near Mahan sets a stepped cascade of pools in the middle of the desert. The Mughal line continues in the Shalamar Gardens of Lahore, built under Shah Jahan on descending terraces, and in Shalimar Bagh beside Dal Lake in Srinagar, laid out for Jahangir. On Mount Carmel in Haifa, the Bahá'í Terraces descend the slope in a modern, strictly symmetrical flight of gardens.
In East Asia, the Humble Administrator's Garden is the largest of the classical gardens of Suzhou, a sequence of ponds, pavilions and rockeries from the Ming dynasty. Kenroku-en in Kanazawa and Kōraku-en in Okayama belong to the Three Great Gardens of Japan, while Ritsurin Garden in Takamatsu spreads its ponds beneath a forested hill. Ryōan-ji in Kyoto is the most famous of all dry gardens, fifteen stones on raked gravel, and the gardens of Tōfuku-ji add a twentieth-century chequerboard of moss and stone.
In this list
| # | Place | Type | Country | UNESCO |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Fin Garden | Historic garden | Iran | |
| 2 | Kenroku-en | Historic garden | Japan | |
| 3 | Shalamar Gardens | Historic garden | Pakistan | |
| 4 | Kōraku-en | Historic garden | Japan | |
| 5 | Humble Administrator's Garden | Historic garden | People's Republic of China | |
| 6 | Ryōan-ji Temple | Historic garden | Japan | ✓ |
| 7 | Shalimar Bagh, Srinagar | Historic garden | India | |
| 8 | Bahá'í Terraces | Historic garden | Israel | |
| 9 | Ritsurin Garden | Historic garden | Japan | |
| 10 | Shazdeh Garden | Historic garden | Iran | |
| 11 | Tōfuku-ji Temple | Historic garden | Japan |
01 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. The contrast between the cool green interior and the dry hills visible over the walls is the whole point of the Persian garden, and here it can still be felt rather than imagined.
Did you know? The spring sits high enough that its natural pressure drives the fountains with no pumps at all.
02 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. The point of walking through Kenroku-en is to see how the Maeda gardeners reconciled them, opening broad lawns and pond views in one place and closing them into shaded paths a few steps further on, with glimpses out over the city towards the mountains and the Sea of Japan.
Did you know? The Karasaki pine, the garden's most celebrated tree, was grown from a seed that the 13th lord Nariyasu brought from Karasaki on the shore of Lake Biwa.
03 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. In Kashmir the water fell naturally down a hillside; in flat Lahore it had to be engineered, and a canal more than 150 km long was dug to bring water to the site.
Did you know? After the hydraulic works were lost, UNESCO placed the gardens and Lahore Fort on its List of World Heritage in Danger in 2000, removing them in 2012.
04 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. The design follows the kaiyū or promenade style: a path winds around the central Sawa-no-ike pond with its three islands and along a stream about 640 metres long, revealing a new view at every turn — tea houses, open lawns, hills, bridges and the castle itself borrowed into the scenery.
Did you know? The garden first included rice paddies and vegetable fields because Ikeda Tsunamasa loved rural scenery; in 1771 a cash-strapped successor had them turned into lawn.
05 Humble Administrator's Garden
People's Republic of China31.326° N 120.624° E
Zhangzhugang · CC BY-SA 4.0 Wang's friend Wen Zhengming, one of the great painters of Suzhou, recorded the garden in words and pictures: an album of 31 views with poems in 1533 and a second of eight leaves in 1551, which make it one of the best-documented gardens of its time. After Wang's death his son is said to have lost the property gambling, and for centuries it passed through many hands and was split into separate estates. In 1860 the Taiping prince Li Xiucheng took it over as his residence and remodelled it, and much of what one sees today dates from that period.
Did you know? More than 700 Suzhou-style penjing, the Chinese art of miniature potted landscapes, are kept in the garden's collection.
06 Ryōan-ji Temple
Japan · 2.7 km from Kyoto35.034° N 135.718° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
663highland · CC BY-SA 4.0 The temple belongs to the Myōshin-ji branch of Rinzai Zen. The land was an estate of the Fujiwara clan, whose large pond still lies in the temple grounds. In 1450 the warlord Hosokawa Katsumoto founded a Zen temple here; it burned in the Ōnin War, and his son Masamoto rebuilt it in 1488. The garden's own origins are uncertain. Its creator and date are disputed, with proposals ranging from the late 15th century to the Edo period, and the earliest clear description, from 1680 to 1682, mentions nine large stones, not fifteen, so the present garden differs from what stood there then.
Did you know? After a fire destroyed the buildings in 1779, the rubble was dumped in the garden, and the present garden was laid out on top of it.
07 Shalimar Bagh, Srinagar
India · 9.8 km from Srinagar34.150° N 74.873° E
Rohit14400 · CC BY-SA 4.0 The plan is a lesson in Mughal garden design. The whole garden, about 587 metres long and 251 metres wide, is organised along a single axis, the Shah Nahar, a channel that carries water from the hills down through three terraces. The lowest was the public garden of the emperor's audience hall; the middle one, with its hall of private audience, was the emperor's own; the highest and most secluded was the zenana garden for the women of the court. At the changes of level the water spills over in small cascades, and behind them are rows of arched niches, the chini khanas, where oil lamps were once set so that the falling water glowed at night.
Did you know? Jahangir and Nur Jahan travelled to Kashmir at least 13 times, crossing the Pir Panjal range on elephants.
08 Bahá'í Terraces
Israel · 1.2 km from Haifa32.814° N 34.987° E
Image by 696188 from Pixabay The design is the work of the architect Fariborz Sahba, who began on it in 1987; the completed terraces opened to the public in June 2001. The plan is built on nine concentric circles centred on the shrine, and the planting borrows openly from several traditions: the geometry of Persian gardens, the stepped water gardens of Kashmir, the lawns and borders of English landscaping. Running down the staircases on both sides are narrow stone channels in which water slips from terrace to terrace, and the clipped hedges, gravel paths and balustrades are kept with a precision that is part of the devotional meaning of the place.
Did you know? The eighteen terraces flanking the shrine stand for the Báb's first eighteen disciples, while nineteen is a sacred number in the Bahá'í and Bábí faiths.
09 Ritsurin Garden
Japan · 1.7 km from Takamatsu34.330° N 134.044° E
Leela Soden · CC BY-SA 3.0 It took more than a century to make. The feudal lord Ikoma Takatoshi began it around 1625, and when the Matsudaira family took over the Takamatsu domain they continued the work, generation after generation, until the fifth Matsudaira lord, Yoritaka, completed it in 1745. After the Meiji Restoration the government took it over, and on 16 March 1875 it opened to the public.
Did you know? The Neagari Goyomatsu began as a bonsai given by shogun Tokugawa Ienari in 1833; planted out, it grew to about eight metres.
10 Shazdeh Garden
Iran · 36.3 km from Kerman30.024° N 57.282° E
Diego Delso · CC BY-SA 4.0 The garden belongs to the Qajar period. It was laid out around 1850 for Mohammad Hasan Khan Sardari Iravani, then governor of Kerman, and greatly enlarged from the 1870s by Abdolhamid Mirza Naser al-Dowleh, who governed the province for eleven years and used the main pavilion as a summer residence. His death in the early 1890s halted the work. Local tradition holds that when news of the governor's sudden death reached Mahan, a builder finishing the entrance portal struck his tray of plaster against the wall and walked away — and gaps in the tilework of the gateway are still pointed out as the proof.
Did you know? Its site on the road from Kerman to Bam, an old caravan route, made it a natural spot for a governor's country retreat.
11 Tōfuku-ji Temple
Japan · 6.7 km from Kyoto34.976° N 135.774° E
PlusMinus · CC BY-SA 3.0 The monastery was founded in 1236 by the imperial chancellor Kujō Michiie, who took its name from two great temples of Nara, Tōdai-ji and Kōfuku-ji. Its first abbot was the monk Enni, who had studied Rinzai Zen in China under Wuzhun Shifan; a portrait of his teacher painted in 1238, which Enni brought back with him, is still kept here. Tōfuku-ji was counted among the Five Mountains, the leading Zen temples of Kyoto, and was conceived in the image of the public monasteries of Zhejiang.
Did you know? The famous checkerboard of moss and square stones in the north garden was made from paving slabs recycled from inside one of the temple's gates.
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 historic gardens in Asia?
- On our list, Fin Garden (Iran) ranks first, followed by Kenroku-en (Japan) and Shalamar Gardens (Pakistan).
- Which country has the most historic gardens in Asia?
- In our collection, the most come from Japan (5), Iran (2) and India (1).
- What is a Persian garden?
- A Persian garden, or chahar bagh, is a walled garden divided into four parts by water channels or paths, symbolising paradise. Nine Iranian examples, including the Fin and Shazdeh gardens, are inscribed together on the UNESCO World Heritage List as The Persian Garden.
- What are the Three Great Gardens of Japan?
- Kenroku-en in Kanazawa, Kōraku-en in Okayama and Kairaku-en in Mito. All three are stroll gardens created by feudal lords in the Edo period.
- Why can you never see all the stones at Ryōan-ji?
- The garden's fifteen stones are arranged so that from any point on the viewing veranda at least one of them is hidden behind another. Many interpretations have been proposed, but the designer's intention is not recorded.
- How many historic gardens are on this list in Asia?
- The list covers 11 historic gardens in 6 countries. Japan has the most, with 5.