The Most Beautiful Mountains in Asia

31 places in 12 countries · updated 14 October 2026

1. 01 Mount Elbrus

   Russia43.353° N 42.438° E

   

   From its ice cap spread around two dozen glaciers covering well over a hundred square kilometres, the largest of them the Bolshoi Azau on the south side. They feed three of the region's major rivers, the Kuban, the Malka and the Baksan, and like almost every glacier in the Caucasus they have been shrinking for a century. The first recorded ascent was made in July 1829, when Khillar Khashirov, a local guide with a Russian scientific expedition under General Georgy Emmanuel, reached the eastern summit alone while the academicians turned back below 5,300 m; an inscription carved on a rock near their camp still records the event.

   Did you know? In 1998 Karachay riders first took horses to the eastern summit, shod with removable steel spikes; a year later they reached the western top.

   More about Mount Elbrus →

2. 02 Puncak Jaya

   Indonesia4.083° S 137.183° E

   

   Its name recalls the Dutch navigator Jan Carstenszoon, who reported glaciers on the mountain in 1623 and was mocked in Europe for claiming snow in the tropics. A Dutch expedition in 1936 reached the neighbouring Ngga Pulu and East Carstensz summits but not the rock pyramid, which was first climbed in 1962 by a party led by Heinrich Harrer with Philip Temple, Russell Kippax and Bert Huizenga. The small glaciers that once covered the massif are retreating fast; the Meren Glacier vanished around the turn of the millennium, and scientists have predicted that the rest will not survive much longer.

   Did you know? It ranks fifth in the world for topographic isolation, the distance to the nearest higher ground.

   More about Puncak Jaya →

3. 03 Nanda Devi

   India30.374° N 79.971° E

   

   The name is usually rendered as "Bliss-Giving Goddess", and the peak is revered as the patron deity of the Garhwal and Kumaon hills. Until surveys in 1808 showed Dhaulagiri to be taller, Nanda Devi was believed to be the highest mountain on Earth. Simply reaching its foot took half a century: W. W. Graham was turned back in the Rishi valley in 1883, Hugh Ruttledge failed three times in the early 1930s, and only in 1934 did Eric Shipton and Bill Tilman, with the Sherpas Angtharkay, Pasang and Kusang, find a line through the gorge into the Sanctuary. Two years later a small British-American expedition climbed the south ridge, and on 29 August 1936 Tilman and Noel Odell reached the top.

   Did you know? It is ranked the 23rd-highest peak on Earth, and to the east it towers more than 6,500 metres above the Goriganga valley only about 50 km away.

   More about Nanda Devi →

4. 04 Mount Everest

   Nepal27.988° N 86.925° E

   

   The top of the world was once the floor of a sea. The summit pyramid is Ordovician limestone, and geologists have found microscopic fragments of crinoids, ancient marine animals, in rock taken from high on the peak. Below it lies the Yellow Band, a tawny layer of marble and schist around 8,200 to 8,600 metres that climbers on the Nepali route must traverse with fixed ropes. At the summit the air pressure is roughly a third of that at sea level, and the peak reaches into the path of the jet stream, whose fierce winds can batter it for much of the year; that is why most attempts are squeezed into a short window in May, before the monsoon.

   Did you know? Before it received its English name, British surveyors catalogued the mountain simply as Peak XV.

   More about Mount Everest →

5. 05 Mount Kailash

   People's Republic of China31.067° N 81.313° E

   

   For Hindus it is the home of Shiva and Parvati; for Buddhists it is identified with Mount Meru, the axis of the world; Jains hold that Rishabhadeva, their first tirthankara, attained liberation here; and in the Bön tradition it was the centre of the ancient kingdom of Zhang Zhung. Tibetan legend tells of the yogi Milarepa winning a race to the summit against a Bön master by riding the rays of the sun. The landscape carries weight of its own: the sources of the Indus, the Sutlej, the Brahmaputra and a major tributary of the Ganges all rise within about 60 km of the mountain, and the lakes Manasarovar and Rakshastal lie at its foot.

   Did you know? In 1926 the British official Hugh Ruttledge walked around Kailash and judged it utterly unclimbable; his companion's attempt on the southeast ridge was stopped by heavy snow.

   More about Mount Kailash →

6. 06 Mount Ararat

   Ağrı Dağı

   Turkey · 35.3 km from Artashat39.702° N 44.298° E

   

   Since the Middle Ages, European tradition has identified it with the "mountains of Ararat" in the Book of Genesis, where Noah's Ark came to rest, and expeditions still search its slopes for the Ark from time to time. For Armenians, Masis — their name for the mountain — is a national symbol, painted, written about and shown on the country's coat of arms, even though it has lain within Turkey since the treaties of 1921. In Turkish it is Ağrı Dağı, in Kurdish Çiyayê Agirî. The name Ararat itself goes back to the Iron Age kingdom of Urartu.

   Did you know? Archaeologists have found that an eruption around 2500–2400 BC buried at least one Bronze Age settlement on the north-west flank.

   More about Mount Ararat →

7. 07 Nanga Parbat

   Pakistan35.239° N 74.590° E

   

   It was also one of the first great Himalayan peaks to be tried, and one of the deadliest. The British climber Albert Mummery vanished on its slopes in 1895. In the 1930s German teams, barred from Everest, made it their national objective and suffered repeated deadly losses, most notoriously in 1934; the toll earned it the name Killer Mountain. The first ascent finally came on 3 July 1953, when the Austrian Hermann Buhl went on alone for the final stretch and reached the summit late in the evening, a climb that became mountaineering legend. The first winter ascent was made on 26 February 2016 by Ali Sadpara, Alex Txikon and Simone Moro.

   Did you know? It is one of only two mountains in the world's top twenty for both height and prominence, ranking ninth and fourteenth; the other is Everest.

   More about Nanga Parbat →

8. 08 Mount Fuji

   Japan · 34.7 km from Kōfu35.361° N 138.727° E

   • UNESCO World Heritage

   

   UNESCO inscribed Fuji in 2013 not as a natural site but as a cultural one, a mountain that has inspired artists and poets and drawn pilgrims for centuries. The listing covers 25 places, among them the Fujisan Hongū Sengen Taisha shrine, dedicated to the Shinto goddess Konohanasakuya-hime, and the mountain is ringed by the Fuji Five Lakes. Three of them, Motosu, Shōji and Saiko, are the remains of a single lake divided by lava during the eruption of 864–866. Katsushika Hokusai's woodblock series Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji, from the 1830s, fixed the mountain's image around the world. At the northwest foot lies the dense Aokigahara forest.

   Did you know? Nationalised in the Meiji era, the summit was returned to the shrine after a 1974 Supreme Court ruling, with the formal transfer completed in 2004.

   More about Mount Fuji →

9. 09 K2

   Pakistan35.881° N 76.513° E

   

   What makes K2 so formidable is its shape. It is a steep pyramid that falls away sharply in almost every direction, standing more than 3,000 metres above the glacier floors around it; on the north side it rises about 3,200 metres over only 3 km of horizontal distance. Its more northerly position also means that bad weather is more common than on the Himalayan giants. After the American expedition of 1953, climber George Bell called it a savage mountain that tries to kill you, and the nickname Savage Mountain has stayed.

   Did you know? A Pakistani–Italian expedition in 2014 measured the summit at about 8,609 metres, a couple of metres below the long-quoted figure.

   More about K2 →

10. 10 Jade Dragon Snow Mountain

    People's Republic of China · 34.3 km from Lijiang27.098° N 100.175° E

    

    The massif is the southern end of the Yulong range and part of the Hengduan Mountains of south-west China. On its north-western side the Jinsha, the upper course of the Yangtze, cuts down between Jade Dragon and Haba Snow Mountain to form the dramatic Tiger Leaping Gorge. The slopes carry a rich mix of plants and animals thanks to their range of altitudes and climates. A cable car lifts visitors to a viewing platform at 4,506 metres, and a second platform at 4,680 metres is among the highest in the world. Below the peaks, the alpine meadow of Yunshanping, Spruce Meadow, opens out among the forest.

    Did you know? About 19 small glaciers cling to the massif, covering roughly 11.6 square kilometres in all.

    More about Jade Dragon Snow Mountain →

11. 11 Kanchenjunga

    India27.703° N 88.147° E

    

    The mountain is sacred in both Sikkim and Nepal, and that has shaped its climbing history. On 25 May 1955 the British climbers Joe Brown and George Band made the first ascent but stopped just short of the true top, honouring a promise to the Chogyal, the ruler of Sikkim, that the summit itself would be left untouched. The Indian side remains closed to climbers today, and the peak is among the most dangerous of the eight-thousanders: since the 1990s, more than one in five people attempting the main summit has died. Local tradition also speaks of a hidden valley of immortality, Beyul Demoshong, on its slopes; in 1962 a Tibetan lama led some 300 followers onto the snows to find it.

    Did you know? Despite being the third-highest mountain, it ranks only 29th in the world for topographic prominence, because its key col lies at just 4,664 m in Tibet.

    More about Kanchenjunga →

12. 12 Belukha

    Russia49.807° N 86.590° E

    • UNESCO World Heritage

    

    From the Gebler (Katun) glacier on the south-western side flows the Katun River, which runs 688 km northwards before meeting the Biya to form the Ob. On the north side the mountain drops in the Akkem Wall, a near-vertical face of rock and ice that falls straight to the Akkem Glacier; at its foot lies the milky-turquoise Akkem Lake, the classic place to see the whole north face reflected on a still morning. Ice cores drilled on the Belukha glacier in 2001–2003 hold a record of climate reaching back thousands of years.

    Did you know? The height was settled only in 2012, when a satellite survey with instruments on six Altai summits at once fixed the eastern peak at 4,509 metres.

    More about Belukha →

13. 13 Rakaposhi

    Pakistan · 30.3 km from Gilgit36.142° N 74.489° E

    

    Its names describe it well. Rakaposhi is usually translated as "shining wall", while the local name Dumani means "mother of mist" or "mother of clouds", for the banners of cloud that so often trail from its crest. The mountain stands between the Nagar and Bagrot valleys, and its northern face towers directly above the villages strung along the Karakoram Highway, so travellers on the road can watch it for hours. It was first climbed in 1958 by the British climbers Mike Banks and Tom Patey, by the long south-west spur; ascents remain rare.

    Did you know? Mike Banks and Tom Patey reached the summit on 25 June 1958, both suffering minor frostbite on the way.

    More about Rakaposhi →

14. 14 Mount Kinabalu

    Malaysia6.075° N 116.559° E

    

    Kinabalu's real fame is biological. Around 5,000 to 6,000 plant species grow on the mountain, including more than 800 orchids and some 600 ferns, and it has the world's richest collection of Nepenthes pitcher plants, among them the endemic Nepenthes rajah, with the largest pitchers known. The climb is a lesson in altitude zones: lowland dipterocarp forest gives way to mossy cloud forest, then to stunted sub-alpine scrub and finally bare rock. Kinabalu Park, created in 1964, became Malaysia's first World Heritage Site in 2000.

    Did you know? Hugh Low reached the summit plateau in 1851 with the Dusun guide Lemaing of Kiau, but judged the highest pinnacle accessible only to winged creatures.

    More about Mount Kinabalu →

15. 15 Mount Hua (Huashan)

    People's Republic of China34.483° N 110.083° E

    

    The mountain has been sacred for more than two thousand years. It is the Western Mountain among the Five Great Mountains of China, and from the Han dynasty onwards emperors made offerings to it as the Western Marchmount; under the Tang, Emperor Xuanzong declared it holy to the imperial house. Daoist hermits and temples settled on its slopes. At the foot of the mountain stands the Cloister of the Jade Spring, dedicated to the Daoist sage Chen Tuan, and the summit of the South Peak once held a Daoist temple whose buildings now serve as a tea house.

    Did you know? Daoists believed the god of the underworld lived on the mountain, and spirit mediums at a shrine at its foot, dating from the 2nd century BC, sought him.

    More about Mount Hua (Huashan) →

16. 16 Klyuchevskaya Sopka

    Russia56.067° N 160.633° E

    

    For its size it is remarkably young. The cone began to grow only about 7,000 years ago and has been built almost entirely by its own eruptions — more than a hundred during the Holocene. Its first recorded eruption dates from 1697, and since then it has been in activity almost without a break; a new eruptive phase began in the summer of 2025. The summit crater is about 300 metres across, and a climbing accident in 2022 at around 4,000 metres, which cost nine lives, is a reminder of how steep and exposed that upper cone is.

    Did you know? With a topographic prominence of about 4,650 metres it ranks roughly thirteenth among all peaks on Earth, ahead of many far higher mountains.

    More about Klyuchevskaya Sopka →

17. 17 Annapurna I

    Nepal28.596° N 83.820° E

    

    The summit is made of sea floor. The upper mountain is a thick stack of early Palaeozoic sedimentary rock, Ordovician limestone and dolomite of the Nilgiri Formation, laid down on the continental shelf of the ancient Tethys Ocean along the northern edge of India. When India drove into Asia, that shelf was folded and thrust high into the Himalaya; at Annapurna the layers tilt steeply northward as part of a great overturned fold. Around the peak lies the Annapurna Conservation Area, covering 7,629 square kilometres, the first and largest of its kind in Nepal, crossed by two of the best-known treks in the Himalaya, the Annapurna Circuit and the route into the Annapurna Sanctuary.

    Did you know? The French first had to find the mountain: their 1920s maps proved badly wrong, and Annapurna lay hidden behind the Nilgiri range.

    More about Annapurna I →

18. 18 Jebel Shams

    Oman23.237° N 57.264° E

    

    That edge is the rim of Wadi An Nakhur, often called the Grand Canyon of Arabia. Here the plateau drops close to a thousand metres in a single sheer wall into a narrow gorge cut into the bare rock of the Hajar. Up here the air is a different country from the coast: summer temperatures sit around 20°C, and in winter they fall below freezing.

    Did you know? Its cliffs are built of limestones laid down in shallow tropical seas between the Late Permian and the Cretaceous, and they still hold fossil corals, crinoids and stromatolites.

    More about Jebel Shams →

19. 19 Mount Pulag

    Philippines · 37.6 km from Baguio16.584° N 120.884° E

    

    The mountain is cold by tropical standards. The summit climate sits on the border between subtropical highland and subpolar oceanic types, frost is common, and in the coolest months temperatures at the top can drop below freezing, making it the coldest place in the country, although snow has never been recorded. Rainfall is heavy, averaging around 4,500 mm a year. The slopes carry a sequence of habitats: Benguet pine forest, mossy forest thick with ferns and lichens, and finally the summit grasslands of dwarf bamboo. Hundreds of plant species have been documented here, along with the Philippine deer and several cloud rats, including the dwarf cloud rat of the Cordillera.

    Did you know? Local tradition holds that the whole mountain is home to spirits called tinmongao.

    More about Mount Pulag →

20. 20 Mayon Volcano

    Philippines · 11.9 km from Legazpi13.257° N 123.685° E

    

    That perfect shape comes from a violent and extremely frequent history. Mayon has erupted at least 50 times since records began in 1616, and independent counts pushing the total number of eruptions since antiquity to nearly 70, giving it one of the shortest average intervals between eruptions of any volcano on Earth — roughly once every eight years across four centuries of record-keeping.

    Did you know? Its longest uninterrupted eruption began on 23 June 1897 and lasted seven days, killing more than 400 people.

    More about Mayon Volcano →

21. 21 Khan Tengri

    People's Republic of China42.211° N 80.175° E

    

    Its sharp outline fooled surveyors for decades: seen from the plains of southern Kazakhstan it looked like the highest summit of the range, and only in 1943 was the bulkier Jengish Chokusu, 16 km to the south, shown to be over 400 m higher. The Russian geographer Pyotr Semenov was the first European to describe the peak, in 1857. Mikhail Pogrebetsky's Ukrainian team made the first ascent in 1931 from the south, finishing along the west ridge; the route still carries his name and remains the most popular, though an avalanche on it in 2004 killed more than a dozen climbers. Under the Soviet system Khan Tengri was one of the five peaks needed for the Snow Leopard award.

    Did you know? Anatoli Boukreev, who rated it perhaps the most beautiful peak on Earth, made the first solo speed ascent in 1990.

    More about Khan Tengri →

22. 22 Mount Sanqing

    People's Republic of China28.952° N 118.052° E

    • UNESCO World Heritage
    • UNESCO natural beauty

    

    The name means "Three Pure Ones", after the trinity of the highest deities of Taoism, because the three main summits — Yujing, the highest at 1,817 metres, Yuxu and Yuhua — were likened to them sitting side by side. The mountain has been a Taoist place for many centuries, and the Ming dynasty was its heyday: at its heart, in a high basin at about 1,530 metres, stands the Sanqing Palace, rebuilt in the 1450s, the centre of a cluster of old Taoist buildings on the mountain.

    Did you know? The mountain sits on an ancient suture where crustal blocks of South China joined about 850 million years ago; its granite peaks are far younger, from the Mesozoic.

    More about Mount Sanqing →

23. 23 Tirich Mir

    Terich Mir

    Pakistan36.246° N 71.844° E

    

    The local stories are part of the place. For the Kalash of the nearby valleys the mountain belongs to the goddess Krumai, who takes the form of a wild goat; Chitrali tradition holds that it is a fortress of fairies who punish anyone climbing it with death. Climbers disproved that in July 1950, when a Norwegian–British party including the philosopher Arne Næss, Per Kvernberg, Henry Berg and Tony Streather reached the top by the south ridge from the South Barum glacier. A Czechoslovak expedition opened the route now considered normal, over the Upper Tirich Glacier and the northwest ridge, in 1967.

    More about Tirich Mir →

24. 24 Mount Yoshino

    Japan34.350° N 135.877° E

    • UNESCO World Heritage

    

    The blossoms are traditionally divided into four groves by altitude: the lower, middle, upper and inner "thousand" (shimo, naka, kami and oku senbon). Because they climb the mountain, they open in sequence, from late March into mid-April near the bottom and into late April at the top, so the bloom moves uphill over several weeks. The sight of whole hillsides in flower at once has its own name, hitome senbon, "a thousand trees at a glance".

    Did you know? In 1336 Emperor Go-Daigo fled Kyoto with the imperial regalia and set up his rival Southern Court at Yoshino, where he died in 1339.

    More about Mount Yoshino →

25. 25 Mount Gongga

    People's Republic of China29.596° N 101.879° E

    

    The peak is carved from granodiorite and sharpened by ice into four narrow ridges with slopes as steep as 70 degrees. 2 km down to about 2,850 metres, deep into forest, and holds the largest icefall in China. That vertical range of more than 6,000 metres packs almost every climate zone into a single slope, from evergreen broadleaf woods through spruce and fir to rhododendron meadows, screes and permanent snow. Botanists have counted some 2,500 species of vascular plants here, and the mountain's forests shelter giant pandas, snow leopards, Thorold's deer and the Chinese monal; it has been a national nature reserve since 1997.

    Did you know? The long-quoted height of 7,556 metres came from a 1966 aerial survey alone, with no measurement ever taken on the ground.

    More about Mount Gongga →

26. 26 Tianmen Mountain

    People's Republic of China29.053° N 110.483° E

    

    Reaching the top is part of the show. A cableway built in 2005 by the French firm Poma starts near Zhangjiajie railway station and climbs 1,279 metres over a length of 7,455 metres, with 98 cabins and gradients of up to 37 degrees; it is promoted locally as one of the longest mountain passenger cableways in the world. The other route is Tongtian Avenue, an 11 km road with 99 hairpin bends that ends below the arch, from where a stairway of 999 steps climbs to Heaven's Gate itself. On the summit plateau, paths are fixed to the cliff faces, some with glass floors, and in August 2016 the Coiling Dragon Cliff skywalk opened above the switchbacks of the road.

    Did you know? Besides its 131.5-metre height, the Tianmen arch is about 57 metres wide and 60 metres deep, and it sits roughly 1,300 metres above sea level.

    More about Tianmen Mountain →

27. 27 Fanjingshan

    People's Republic of China27.920° N 108.690° E

    

    The mountain has been a Buddhist sacred site since at least the Tang dynasty and is revered as a seat of Maitreya. Around the summit the rock has weathered into a crowd of strange forms. The best known is Mushroom Rock, a column about ten metres tall that is wider at the top than at its base and looks as if a strong wind could tip it over. From the ridges, on clear mornings, the forests below are often buried in a sea of cloud, with the pillars standing out of it like islands.

    Did you know? Isolation has made the mountain a hotspot of local endemism, with some 46 plant species and about 245 invertebrate species known only from Fanjingshan.

    More about Fanjingshan →

28. 28 Mount Siguniang

    People's Republic of China31.106° N 102.902° E

    

    The Chinese name is usually explained as a reinterpretation of the local Tibetan and Gyalrong name, Skubla, "tutelary deity", which in Mandarin ears became Siguniang, "four girls". The four peaks are named as sisters in reverse order of height: Dagu, the eldest, at 5,025 metres; Ergu at 5,276 metres; Sangu at 5,355 metres; and Yaomei, the youngest sister, the 6,250-metre main summit. The three lower peaks are climbed regularly, Dagu being little more than a high trek, while Yaomei itself is a serious technical objective. A Japanese party first reached the top in 1981 by the east ridge, and the south-west ridge was not climbed until 2008.

    Did you know? The massif is sometimes nicknamed the Alps of the East.

    More about Mount Siguniang →

29. 29 Namcha Barwa

    People's Republic of China29.631° N 95.055° E

    

    The mountain stands inside the Great Bend of the Yarlung Tsangpo, where the river that has flowed eastward across the Tibetan plateau swings sharply around the massif and plunges into one of the deepest gorges in the world before emerging in India as the Siang and becoming the Brahmaputra. Across the gorge, about 22 km to the north-north-west, rises its sister peak Gyala Peri at 7,294 metres. The botanist and explorer Frank Kingdon-Ward, who travelled the gorge in the 1920s, recorded a prophecy among the Kongpo Tibetans that the mountain would one day collapse into the Tsangpo and force the river to change its course.

    Did you know? The mountain is a sacred site of the Bon religion and is sometimes called the father of all Tibetan mountains.

    More about Namcha Barwa →

30. 30 Maisan

    South Korea · 25.8 km from Jeonju35.761° N 127.412° E

    

    The peaks are made of conglomerate, a rock of pebbles and gravel cemented together, laid down around a hundred million years ago in a Cretaceous lake basin and later lifted by crustal movements; fossils of freshwater fish are still occasionally found. Seen from the south, the steep flanks are pitted with hollows, large and small, that look as if the rock had been shelled. These are tafoni, cavities that form when weathering works from inside the rock outward and pushes off the surface, and Maisan is regarded as an exceptionally rare example of the phenomenon. The mountain is part of the Jinan–Muju National Geopark.

    Did you know? Yi Gap-yong, credited with the stone towers of Tapsa, lived from 1860 to 1957 and descended in the 16th generation from Grand Prince Hyoryeong, a son of King Taejong.

    More about Maisan →