The Most Beautiful Places in Asia
871 places in 45 countries · updated 14 October 2026
In short: By our ranking, the most beautiful places in Asia are Ha Long Bay (Vietnam), Angkor Wat (Cambodia) and Zhangye Danxia Geopark (People's Republic of China). The list covers 871 places in 45 countries. Japan has the most, with 122. Last updated 14 October 2026.
Asia holds the extremes of the planet: the highest mountains, the deepest lake, some of the oldest continuously inhabited cities and several of the world's great religions. The collision of the Indian plate with Eurasia raised the Himalaya, monsoon and desert divide the land into sharply different worlds, and empires from Persia to Japan left temples, mosques and palaces in styles found nowhere else. Few regions mix wilderness and monument on such a scale.
The mountains come first. Mount Everest is the highest point on Earth, Nanda Devi rises within a ring of peaks in the Indian Himalaya, and Puncak Jaya on New Guinea is the highest summit on any island. Mount Elbrus, a dormant volcano with twin snow-capped summits, crowns the Caucasus. Lake Baikal in Siberia is the deepest and oldest lake in the world, holding a large share of the planet's unfrozen fresh water.
The human record runs from antiquity to the present. In Jerusalem, the Western Wall survives from the platform of the Second Temple, and in Lebanon's Bekaa Valley the temples of Baalbek rest on some of the largest stone blocks ever cut. Istanbul's Dolmabahçe Palace brought European grandeur to the Bosphorus shore in the 19th century, and Moscow's Bolshoi Theatre is a temple of ballet. Hashima Island, an abandoned coal-mining town off Nagasaki, is a ghostly counterpoint to the skyscrapers of Taipei 101 and the Petronas Towers. Temples, archaeological sites and mosques lead the kinds here.
In this list
| # | Place | Type | Country | UNESCO |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Ha Long Bay | Protected area | Vietnam | |
| 2 | Angkor Wat | Archaeological site | Cambodia | ✓ |
| 3 | Zhangye Danxia Geopark | Protected area | People's Republic of China | |
| 4 | Petra | Archaeological site | Jordan | ✓ |
| 5 | Taj Mahal | Mausoleum | India | ✓ |
| 6 | Mount Fuji | Volcano | Japan | ✓ |
| 7 | Raja Ampat Islands | Coral reef | Indonesia | |
| 8 | Shwedagon Pagoda | Stupa | Myanmar | |
| 9 | Banaue Rice Terraces | Terraced fields | Philippines | |
| 10 | Son Doong Cave | Cave | Vietnam | |
| 11 | Mount Elbrus | Mountain | Russia | |
| 12 | Taipei 101 | Skyscraper | Taiwan | |
| 13 | Petronas Towers | Skyscraper | Malaysia | |
| 14 | Western Wall | Archaeological site | Palestine | |
| 15 | Baalbek | Archaeological site | Lebanon | ✓ |
| 16 | Puncak Jaya | Mountain | Indonesia | |
| 17 | Bolshoi Theatre | Theatre building | Russia | |
| 18 | Issyk-Kul | Lake | Kyrgyzstan | |
| 19 | Lake Baikal | Lake | Russia | ✓ |
| 20 | Hashima Island | Abandoned mine | Japan | ✓ |
| 21 | Nanda Devi | Mountain | India | |
| 22 | Mount Everest | Mountain | Nepal | |
| 23 | Dolmabahçe Palace | Palace | Turkey | |
| 24 | Dead Sea | Lake | Israel | |
| 25 | Krak des Chevaliers | Castle | Syria | ✓ |
| 26 | Grand Palace | Palace | Thailand | |
| 27 | Burj Al Arab | Skyscraper | United Arab Emirates | |
| 28 | Gateway of India | Triumphal arch | India | |
| 29 | Itsukushima Shrine | Shinto shrine | Japan | |
| 30 | Mount Bromo | Volcano | Indonesia |
01 Ha Long Bay
Vietnam · 12.4 km from Hạ Long20.900° N 107.200° E
- UNESCO natural beauty
Image by xuanduongvan87 from Pixabay Nearly two thousand limestone islets rise straight out of the green water of Ha Long Bay, in Vietnam's far north-east, spread over some 1,550 square kilometres of the Gulf of Tonkin.
Did you know? Some 60 animal species found in and around the bay are endemic to it.
02 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.
Did you know? The bas-reliefs run counter-clockwise, the reverse of normal order, as in Brahmin funeral rites, which supports the idea that it was a royal tomb.
03 Zhangye Danxia Geopark
People's Republic of China · 27.5 km from Zhangye38.916° N 100.133° E
Image by eltonjohn1973 from Pixabay In the foothills of the Qilian Mountains, on the old Silk Road corridor of Gansu province in north-west China, the hills are painted in stripes. Bands of red, orange, yellow, cream and grey-green run across ridges and gullies, folded and tilted so that each hill carries its own pattern.
Did you know? The term danxia, meaning vermilion sunglow, was coined in 1928 and borrowed from a third-century poem by Cao Pi.
04 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? Rome annexed the Nabataean kingdom in AD 106, and Hadrian visited in 130, giving the city the title Hadriane Petra Metropolis.
05 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? Calligraphy on the high gateway panels is written in slightly larger letters, so the script appears uniform in size when read from the ground.
06 Mount Fuji
Japan · 34.7 km from Kōfu35.361° N 138.727° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
名古屋太郎, (edited by Hannes_24 ) · CC BY-SA 3.0 Mount Fuji is an active stratovolcano on Honshu, and at 3,776 metres the highest mountain in Japan. Its nearly symmetrical cone, snow-covered for about five months of the year, stands about 100 km southwest of Tokyo and can be seen from the capital on clear days.
Did you know? Women were officially barred from the summit until 1872, yet Tatsu Takayama is on record as reaching the top in 1832.
07 Raja Ampat Islands
Indonesia0.233° S 130.517° E
Image by Ady_Fauzan from Pixabay Raja Ampat is a scattering of more than 1,500 islands, cays and shoals off the northwestern tip of New Guinea, gathered around four large islands: Waigeo, Batanta, Salawati and Misool.
Did you know? The surrounding waters are visited by blue, Bryde's, Omura's and sperm whales, as well as dugongs, whale sharks and even orcas.
08 Shwedagon Pagoda
Myanmar · 2.2 km from Yangon16.798° N 96.149° E
Image by sharonang from Pixabay The golden stupa of Shwedagon crowns Singuttara Hill in the middle of Yangon and dominates the whole city. The spire itself is about 112 metres tall, and with the hill beneath it its tip stands some 170 metres above sea level. It is the most sacred Buddhist site in Myanmar.
Did you know? The 23-tonne Maha Gandha bell of 1779 also fell into the river when the British tried to ship it away; divers raised it using bamboo poles.
09 Banaue Rice Terraces
Philippines16.935° N 121.135° E
Image by lester56 from Pixabay The terraces of Banaue climb the walls of a deep valley in the Cordillera of northern Luzon, around 1,500 metres above sea level, in flight after flight of narrow paddies that follow every fold of the mountainside.
Did you know? The final harvest rites include tungul, a day of rest on which any agricultural work is strictly taboo.
10 Son Doong Cave
Vietnam · 33.3 km from Đồng Hới17.457° N 106.288° E
Trantuanviet · CC BY-SA 4.0 Hang Sơn Đoòng, in the karst of Phong Nha–Kẻ Bàng National Park near the Laos border, holds the largest known cave passage on Earth. 5 million cubic metres; its cross-section is thought to be roughly twice that of the next-largest passage, Deer Cave in Malaysian Borneo.
Did you know? Trees up to about 30 metres tall grow in the cave's forest, and more than 200 plant species have been recorded underground.
11 Mount Elbrus
Russia43.353° N 42.438° E
Image by vishstudio from Pixabay Elbrus is a volcano that stopped short of the main Caucasus ridge.
Did you know? Elbrus is the highest volcano in Eurasia and ranks as the tenth most topographically prominent peak on Earth.
12 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? During construction in March 2002 an earthquake toppled two cranes from the 56th floor, killing five people.
13 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.
Did you know? The skybridge weighs about 750 tonnes and is considered the highest two-storey bridge in the world.
14 Western Wall
Palestine · 2.6 km from Jerusalem31.777° N 35.234° E
Diego Delso · CC BY-SA 3.0 What stands in the plaza today isn't a wall of the Temple itself — it's the western retaining wall of the platform the Temple sat on, part of a vast expansion Herod the Great ordered around 19 BCE to turn the Temple Mount into the largest religious platform anywhere in the ancient world.
Did you know? At its southern end, Robinson's Arch once carried a monumental staircase as wide as a modern four-lane road up onto the Temple Mount.
15 Baalbek
Lebanon · 33 km from Zahlé34.006° N 36.209° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by djedj from Pixabay Nowhere else did Rome build on quite this scale. On a hill in Lebanon's Beqaa Valley, where the city of Heliopolis once worshipped a local storm god under the name of Jupiter, the imperial architects raised a sanctuary on a platform whose retaining walls are made of single stones.
Did you know? Inscriptions to the god of Heliopolis have turned up as far away as Athens, Rome, Gaul and near Hadrian's Wall in Britain.
16 Puncak Jaya
Indonesia4.083° S 137.183° E
Alfindra Primaldhi · CC BY 2.0 At 4,884 m, Puncak Jaya — also called Carstensz Pyramid, and Nemangkawi Ninggok, "peak of the white arrow", in the language of the Amungme people — is the highest mountain in Indonesia, the highest on any island on Earth and, for climbers who count New Guinea with Australia, the Oceania entry among the Seven Summits.
Did you know? In 1936, when ice still covered about 13 square kilometres of the massif, glacier-capped Ngga Pulu was probably the true summit, over 4,900 metres high.
17 Bolshoi Theatre
Russia · 0.8 km from Moscow55.760° N 37.619° E
Юрий Д.К. · CC BY 4.0 The eight-columned portico on Theatre Square, crowned by Apollo driving a four-horse chariot, is one of the most familiar façades in Russia — it even appears on the 100-rouble banknote. Behind it is the Bolshoi, home to one of the oldest and most celebrated ballet and opera companies in the world.
Did you know? Before the six-year restoration that began in 2005, engineers judged more than three quarters of the building's structure to be unstable.
18 Issyk-Kul
Kyrgyzstan · 29.5 km from Cholpon-Ata42.417° N 77.250° E
Bgag · CC0 Issyk-Kul is a sea set high in the Tian Shan: a lake 182 kilometres long and up to 60 wide, lying at 1,607 metres between two parallel walls of mountains — the Kungey Ala-Too on the north shore, which divides Kyrgyzstan from Kazakhstan, and the higher, snowier Teskey Ala-Too on the south.
19 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…
Did you know? Tiny endemic copepods make up 80 to 90 per cent of the lake's biomass and filter as much as a thousand cubic kilometres of water a year.
20 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.
Did you know? Alongside the school, hospital and cinema, the miners' town also had its own pachinko parlour.
21 Nanda Devi
India30.374° N 79.971° E
No machine-readable author provided. Amir85~commonswiki assumed (based on copyright claims). · CC BY 2.5 Nanda Devi rises to 7,817 metres in the Garhwal Himalaya of Uttarakhand: the highest summit standing wholly inside India, and second in the country only to Kangchenjunga, which sits on the border with Nepal. The figure matters less than the shape of the ground around it.
Did you know? Apart from the Rishi Gorge, every route into the Sanctuary crosses a high pass, and even the lowest of them lies at about 5,180 metres.
22 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.
Did you know? George Everest pronounced his own surname 'EEV-rist', so the mountain's modern pronunciation differs from that of the man it honours.
23 Dolmabahçe Palace
Turkey · 3.3 km from Istanbul41.039° N 29.002° E
Image by krigell from Pixabay Dolmabahçe Palace lines the European shore of the Bosphorus in Istanbul, a long white facade of columns and carved stone reflected in the water. Its name means "filled-in garden": the site was once a bay where the Ottoman fleet anchored, reclaimed in the eighteenth century as an imperial garden.
Did you know? The palace's art collection includes 23 paintings by the Russian marine painter Ivan Aivazovsky.
24 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? Its salt is only about 30 percent sodium chloride, compared with roughly 85 percent in ocean water, and it holds the highest bromide concentration of any water on Earth.
25 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.
Did you know? Of a garrison of around 2,000, only about 60 were knights of the order, lodged in the great round towers of the inner ward.
26 Grand Palace
Thailand · 2.5 km from Bangkok13.750° N 100.492° E
Preecha.MJ · CC BY-SA 4.0 The Grand Palace in Bangkok is not one building but a walled city of them: throne halls, pavilions, gates and a royal chapel spread over about 218,000 square metres on the bank of the Chao Phraya, gilded spires and roofs of green and orange tile rising within four walls.
Did you know? In 1789 lightning burned down the first throne hall, a copy of one at Ayutthaya, and Rama I reportedly predicted that his dynasty would last only 150 years.
27 Burj Al Arab
United Arab Emirates · 13.1 km from Dubai25.141° N 55.185° E
Image by keerthichn from Pixabay The Burj al-Arab was designed to be a single, instantly readable image, and it succeeds: a white sail billowing from a mast on its own island off the Dubai coast.
Did you know? There are no ordinary rooms: all 199 units are suites, the smallest about 169 square metres and the largest about 780.
28 Gateway of India
India · 16.8 km from Mumbai18.922° N 72.835° E
Image by prabhdeep567 from Pixabay The strange thing about the Gateway of India is that its most famous moment — commemorating the arrival of King George V and Queen Mary in December 1911 — happened thirteen years before the monument itself was finished.
Did you know? Building the Gateway cost about 21 lakh rupees, roughly 2.1 million rupees in the money of its day.
29 Itsukushima Shrine
Japan · 15.2 km from Hiroshima34.296° N 132.320° E
Image by JordyMeow from Pixabay Itsukushima Shrine is built not on the island of Miyajima but in front of it, on the tidal flats of a shallow bay in the Seto Inland Sea.
Did you know? The Heike Nokyo, 32 decorated sutra scrolls copied by Taira no Kiyomori, his sons and other clan members, is one of the shrine's National Treasures.
30 Mount Bromo
Indonesia · 30.4 km from Probolinggo7.943° S 112.954° E
Image by Gustomak from Pixabay Mount Bromo isn't the tallest peak in its own volcanic complex — that title belongs to neighboring Mount Semeru — but it's the one everyone comes to see, because it's the one that's actually doing something.
Did you know? The Tengger Sand Sea covers about 5,250 hectares and has been a protected nature reserve since 1919.
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 places in Asia?
- On our list, Ha Long Bay (Vietnam) ranks first, followed by Angkor Wat (Cambodia) and Zhangye Danxia Geopark (People's Republic of China).
- Which country has the most places in Asia?
- In our collection, the most come from Japan (122), the People's Republic of China (105) and India (90).
- How deep is Lake Baikal?
- Lake Baikal reaches a depth of about 1,642 metres, making it the deepest lake in the world. It is also considered the oldest, at roughly 25 million years.
- How tall is Mount Everest?
- The official height agreed by Nepal and China in 2020 is 8,848.86 metres above sea level, the highest point on Earth.
- What is the Western Wall?
- The Western Wall in Jerusalem is a section of the ancient retaining wall built around the Temple Mount in the time of Herod the Great. It is the most sacred place where Jews are permitted to pray.
- What kinds of places are there to see in Asia?
- In our collection, the places in Asia are most often temples (70), archaeological sites (66), lakes (46) and mosques (44).
- How many places are on this list in Asia?
- The list covers 871 places in 45 countries. Japan has the most, with 122.