The Most Beautiful Squares, Streets and Monuments in Asia
36 places in 12 countries · updated 13 October 2026
In short: By our ranking, the most beautiful squares, streets and monuments in Asia are Gateway of India (India), Hiroshima Peace Memorial (Japan) and Terracotta Army (People's Republic of China). The list covers 36 squares, streets and monuments in 12 countries. Japan has the most, with 8. Last updated 13 October 2026.
Monuments across this vast region come from very different worlds: imperial tombs of ancient China, Mughal mausoleums and Hindu stepwells in India, Newar royal squares in the Kathmandu Valley, Persian covered bazaars, Kremlin towers and colossal Soviet memorials, and 21st-century broadcast towers in Tokyo and Guangzhou. What unites them is scale and ambition, and an urge to mark history in stone, brick or steel.
The Terracotta Army near Xi'an, found by farmers in 1974, guards the tomb of the first Qin emperor with thousands of individually modelled soldiers. In India, the Taj Mahal was built by Shah Jahan as a tomb for Mumtaz Mahal, the Qutb Minar in Delhi rises as a fluted brick minaret, and Rani ki Vav in Gujarat descends into the ground through tiers of carved stone. The Gateway of India in Mumbai, completed in 1924, faces the harbour as a basalt arch.
Memory and power take other forms elsewhere. The Hiroshima Peace Memorial, the skeletal dome that survived the atomic bomb in 1945, stands beside the river as a World Heritage site. Moscow's Spasskaya Tower, with its great clock, crowns the Kremlin wall above Red Square, and The Motherland Calls lifts her sword over Volgograd on Mamayev Kurgan. The Tabriz Bazaar is one of the oldest covered markets of the Middle East, while Patan Durbar Square gathers pagoda temples and a stone Krishna temple before the old royal palace. Tokyo Skytree and the Canton Tower add a modern skyline.
In this list
| # | Place | Type | Country | UNESCO |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Gateway of India | Triumphal arch | India | |
| 2 | Hiroshima Peace Memorial | War memorial | Japan | ✓ |
| 3 | Terracotta Army | Archaeological site | People's Republic of China | ✓ |
| 4 | Spasskaya Tower | Clock tower | Russia | |
| 5 | Qutb complex | Archaeological site | India | ✓ |
| 6 | Taj Mahal | Mausoleum | India | ✓ |
| 7 | Rani ki Vav | Stepwell | India | |
| 8 | The Motherland Calls | War memorial | Russia | |
| 9 | Tabriz Bazaar | Covered passageway | Iran | |
| 10 | Tokyo Skytree | Observation tower | Japan | |
| 11 | Canton Tower | Observation tower | People's Republic of China | |
| 12 | Patan Durbar Square | Square | Nepal | |
| 13 | Göbekli Tepe | Archaeological site | Turkey | ✓ |
| 14 | India Gate | War memorial | India | |
| 15 | Red Square | Square | Russia | ✓ |
| 16 | Naqsh-e Jahan Square | Square | Iran | ✓ |
| 17 | Registan | Square | Uzbekistan | ✓ |
| 18 | Tokyo Tower | Observation tower | Japan | |
| 19 | Worker and Kolkhoz Woman | Sculpture | Russia | |
| 20 | Plain of Jars | Megalith | Laos | ✓ |
| 21 | Palace Square | Square | Russia | ✓ |
| 22 | Maiden Tower | Monument | Azerbaijan | ✓ |
| 23 | Blue Mosque, Mazar-i-Sharif | Mosque | Afghanistan | |
| 24 | Leshan Giant Buddha | Sculpture | People's Republic of China | ✓ |
| 25 | Victoria Peak | Scenic viewpoint | People's Republic of China | |
| 26 | Philosopher's Walk | Pedestrian street | Japan | |
| 27 | Chand Baori | Stepwell | India | |
| 28 | Al-Shaheed Monument | War memorial | Iraq | |
| 29 | Amanohashidate | Scenic viewpoint | Japan | |
| 30 | Leaning Tower of Nevyansk | Clock tower | Russia |
01 Gateway of India
India · 16.8 km from Mumbai18.922° N 72.835° E
Image by prabhdeep567 from Pixabay Architect George Wittet designed it in the Indo-Saracenic style, deliberately fusing Gothic structural bones with Hindu- and Islamic-derived surface ornament — a visual argument, intentional or not, about what British rule in India was supposed to look like. It took until 1924 to complete, using yellow basalt quarried locally and reinforced concrete, with a central dome rising 26 metres on four turrets.
Did you know? The central dome measures about 15 metres across, and halls on either side of the arch can each hold around 600 people.
02 Hiroshima Peace Memorial
Japan · 1.3 km from Hiroshima34.396° N 132.454° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
DXR · CC BY-SA 4.0 After the war, many in Hiroshima wanted the ruin cleared away; others argued it should remain as a memorial. As the Peace Memorial Park took shape around it between 1950 and 1964, the Dome stayed, and in 1966 the city council resolved to preserve it permanently. The mayor, Shinzo Hamai, raised money in Japan and abroad, at one point collecting donations on the streets of Tokyo.
Did you know? When it opened, Hiroshima was a city of mostly two-storey wooden houses, so Letzel's large building immediately became a striking landmark.
03 Terracotta Army
People's Republic of China · 24.5 km from Weinan34.385° N 109.273° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by artemtation from Pixabay What makes the find keep giving up new detail is that no two soldiers are alike. Heads were sculpted separately from the mass-produced bodies, which let craftsmen vary hairstyle, facial features, ear shape and expression figure by figure across a workforce of thousands — more than 8,000 figures are believed to exist in total, of which just over 2,000 have been excavated from three pits so far, leaving an estimated 6,000 still underground.
Did you know? Legs were built much like terracotta drainage pipes, and heads, arms and torsos were made separately before assembly.
04 Spasskaya Tower
Russia · 0.5 km from Moscow55.752° N 37.621° E
Юрий Д.К. · CC BY 4.0 In 1624–25 the tower became the first in the Kremlin to receive its tall pinnacled top, designed by Bazhen Ogurtsov together with Christopher Galloway. A clock has hung on the tower since at least the sixteenth century; the chimes, known as the Kremlin kuranty, mark official Moscow time. The present name comes from the icon of the Saviour Not Made by Hands placed above the inner side of the gate in 1658.
Did you know? The current chimes were built by the Butenop brothers in 1851–52 and played a regimental march and Bortnyansky's hymn at set hours.
05 Qutb complex
India · 8.5 km from New Delhi28.524° N 77.185° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by SuanlianTangpua from Pixabay At its foot stands the Quwwat-ul-Islam mosque, the first mosque built in Delhi after the conquest, begun in 1193 inside the captured Rajput citadel. Its inscriptions record that it was assembled from the material of 27 Hindu and Jain temples, and many columns of its colonnades are reused temple pillars that still carry Hindu carving.
Did you know? After an 1803 earthquake, Major Robert Smith crowned the minar with a pillared cupola; it was removed in 1848 and now stands on the lawn as Smith's Folly.
06 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 One story that does not hold up: the popular claim that Shah Jahan had the masons' hands cut off, or the architect blinded, afterward so the design could never be copied.
Did you know? Craftsmen inlaid 28 kinds of precious and semi-precious stone into the white marble using the pietra dura technique.
07 Rani ki Vav
India23.859° N 72.102° E
Kshitij Charania · CC BY-SA 4.0 It is attributed to Udayamati, the queen of the eleventh-century Chaulukya king Bhima I. A medieval chronicle places its commissioning in 1063 and says it took about twenty years to complete, though scholars disagree about the dates. Architecturally it belongs to the Maru-Gurjara style, built on an interlocking system of pillars, brackets and beams — 212 pillars in all.
Did you know? The stepwell creates its own microclimate: warm air cools against the stone and water, keeping the lower levels cool and slowing evaporation.
08 The Motherland Calls
Russia · 4.4 km from Volgograd48.742° N 44.537° E
Image by alex1983 from Pixabay The ensemble was the work of the sculptor Yevgeny Vuchetich with the architect Yakov Belopolsky, the same pair behind the Soviet War Memorial in Berlin's Treptower Park. Their early designs were more modest: a granite group of a kneeling soldier before a female figure of the Motherland, around 30 metres high.
Did you know? Its concrete used a special mix developed for Moscow's Ostankino television tower, poured by hand in half-metre layers from pedestal to neck.
09 Tabriz Bazaar
Iran · 1 km from Tabriz38.081° N 46.292° E
Rei nikoo · CC BY-SA 4.0 Tabriz has been a place of exchange since antiquity, and its bazaar became one of the great commercial centres of the Silk Road. The city was capital of the Mongol Ilkhanate from 1265, flourishing under Ghazan Khan, and served as the first capital of Safavid Iran from 1501.
Did you know? In the carpet section, hand-woven rugs are traditionally grouped by the size and type of their knots.
10 Tokyo Skytree
Japan · 6.1 km from Tokyo35.710° N 139.811° E
Image by cegoh from Pixabay The form changes as it rises: a three-legged base gives way to a cylinder from about 350 m upwards. Its colour, officially Skytree White, is based on aijiro, a traditional pale indigo-white, and at night LED lighting alternates between Iki, a pale sky blue, and Miyabi, a deep purple.
Did you know? The tower was completed on 29 February 2012, a leap day, at a cost of about 65 billion yen.
11 Canton Tower
People's Republic of China · 6.1 km from Guangzhou23.109° N 113.319° E
Image by AndyLeungHK from Pixabay It is the second-tallest tower in China and one of the tallest free-standing structures in the world. The main body is 450 m high and the antenna adds another 150; inside are TV and radio facilities, restaurants including a two-storey revolving one, gardens, cinemas and exhibition spaces.
Did you know? The tower weighs about 100,000 tonnes, of which the antenna mast accounts for roughly 1,550 tonnes.
12 Patan Durbar Square
Nepal · 1 km from Lalitpur27.673° N 85.326° E
Image by 10914001 from Pixabay Look first at the Krishna Mandir, built in the seventeenth century under Siddhi Narsingh Malla. Unlike the pagoda roofs around it, it is a stone temple in the shikhara style, a cluster of small pavilions climbing to a central spire, and the friezes along its upper storeys narrate scenes from the Mahabharata and the Ramayana in tiny carved figures.
Did you know? The Taleju temple, shrine of the Malla kings' personal goddess, was built in 1640 and rebuilt in 1667 after a fire.
13 Göbekli Tepe
Göbeklitepe
Turkey · 12.8 km from Şanlıurfa37.223° N 38.922° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Spica-Vega Photo Arts (Banu Nazikcan) · CC BY-SA 4.0 What visitors come to see are the enclosures: round and oval spaces 10 to 30 metres across, their walls set with T-shaped limestone pillars, the oldest known megaliths anywhere. 5 metres tall and weigh an estimated eight to ten tonnes each. The T is not a mere support: the pillars are stylised human figures seen from the side, and some carry carved arms that bend round to hands meeting above the belly, belts and fox-pelt loincloths.
Did you know? Rock-cut cisterns fed by carved channels collected rainwater on the hilltop and could store at least 150 cubic metres of water.
14 India Gate
India · 3.2 km from New Delhi28.613° N 77.229° E
Image by shalender from Pixabay The designer was Edwin Lutyens, the principal architect of New Delhi and a member of the Imperial War Graves Commission, whose Cenotaph in London had set the tone for secular remembrance after 1918. India Gate follows the same idea: no crosses or religious symbols, only mass, proportion and inscription.
Did you know? The avenue leading to the gate was laid out as Kingsway, became Rajpath after independence and was renamed Kartavya Path, the 'Path of Duty', in September 2022.
15 Red Square
Russia · 0.4 km from Moscow55.754° N 37.620° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by joneybrain from Pixabay Almost every building around it is a landmark in its own right. At the southern end, Saint Basil's Cathedral — the Intercession on the Moat — was built in 1555–1561 for Ivan the Terrible to mark the capture of Kazan, a cluster of chapels crowned by nine onion domes whose bright colours came later, in the seventeenth century.
Did you know? The State Historical Museum at the northern end holds around 4.5 million objects, making it one of Russia's largest museum collections.
16 Naqsh-e Jahan Square
Iran · 5.2 km from Isfahan32.658° N 51.677° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Amir Pashaei · CC BY-SA 4.0 Each side holds something different. To the south stands the Shah Mosque, the vast Friday mosque with the largest dome in the city; its entrance faces the square, but the building behind it swings round at an angle to face Mecca, a turn you make almost without noticing as you pass through the portal. On the east side is the smaller Sheikh Lotfollah Mosque, the first of the four to be built and intended as the royal court's private mosque.
Did you know? In Safavid times a water channel ran along all four sides of the square, bordered by stone walkways.
17 Registan
Uzbekistan · 3.1 km from Samarkand39.655° N 66.976° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Bernard Gagnon · CC0 The oldest of the three buildings, on the western side, is the madrasa of Ulugh Beg, raised between 1417 and 1420 by Timur's grandson, the ruler-astronomer who is said to have lectured there himself. Its great arched portal is covered with geometric ornament in glazed brick and mosaic, and in the fifteenth century it counted among the leading places of learning in the Muslim East.
Did you know? The Ulugh Beg madrasa measures about 56 by 81 metres, with a minaret some 33 metres high at each corner and around fifty student cells.
18 Tokyo Tower
Japan · 3.2 km from Tokyo35.659° N 139.746° E
Image by LittleMouse from Pixabay Its colours are set by aviation rules: bands of white and international orange, renewed roughly every seven years with some 28,000 litres of paint in a job that takes a year. It remained Japan's tallest structure until Tokyo Skytree was completed in 2012 and took over television broadcasting, though FM radio stations still transmit from the tower.
Did you know? The 2011 Tōhoku earthquake bent the tip of the antenna, and during repairs in 2012 the tower briefly stood only 315 metres tall.
19 Worker and Kolkhoz Woman
Russia · 8.5 km from Moscow55.828° N 37.647° E
Image by EvgeniT from Pixabay The engineering was novel. 5 mm skin was joined to its internal frame by spot welding instead of rivets. The group was assembled in the yard of a Moscow factory in a few months over a harsh winter, cut into 65 pieces for the train to Paris and reassembled there. The billowing scarf that seems to float behind the figures needed its own supporting truss.
Did you know? The pieces travelled to Paris in 28 railway wagons, and some had to be cut down on the way to pass through tunnels.
20 Plain of Jars
Laos · 5.1 km from Phonsavan19.431° N 103.153° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Jakub Hałun · CC BY-SA 4.0 The jars are prehistoric and connected with the dead. The French archaeologist Madeleine Colani, who studied them in the 1930s, found burnt bone, teeth and glass beads inside and burials around them, and concluded that they belonged to an Iron Age funerary tradition.
Did you know? Experimental archaeology has shown the jars could have been shaped with stone tools alone, without iron chisels.
21 Palace Square
Russia · 0.2 km from Saint Petersburg59.939° N 30.315° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
W. Bulach · CC BY-SA 4.0 In the middle rises the Alexander Column, designed by Auguste de Montferrand and raised between 1830 and 1834: a single shaft of red granite 47.5 metres tall and weighing some 500 tons, standing on its base by its own weight without any fixings. Despite the century that separates palace and arch, the Neoclassical buildings match the Baroque palace in height and rhythm, and the result is one of the most coherent grand squares in Europe.
Did you know? In 1920 a mass re-enactment of the storming of the Winter Palace was staged here before about 100,000 spectators.
22 Maiden Tower
Azerbaijan · 4 km from Baku40.366° N 49.837° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by Maxxja from Pixabay No one agrees on when or why it was built. A Kufic inscription on the south wall names Masud ibn Davud, a 12th-century architect, and most of the present structure is generally dated to that century. Some historians argue that its foundations and lower storeys are far older, from the 4th to 6th centuries, pointing to differences in the stone.
Did you know? Diamond-cut stonework runs through the walls from top to bottom, plain at the base and more ornate higher up, which suggests it was built in one campaign.
23 Blue Mosque, Mazar-i-Sharif
Afghanistan · 1.4 km from Mazar-i-Sharif36.709° N 67.111° E
Françoise Foliot · CC BY-SA 4.0 Its history is one of repeated loss and return. A first shrine was raised in 1136 by the Seljuk sultan Ahmad Sanjar; the Mongols destroyed it in 1220, reportedly believing treasure lay beneath. The present sanctuary goes back to 1480–81, when the Timurid ruler Sultan Husayn Bayqara, with his minister, the poet Ali Shir Nava'i, raised the sanctuary that stands today.
Did you know? Tiles wear out constantly, weathered by the climate and, according to the workshop, chipped away by pilgrims who take fragments home as relics.
24 Leshan Giant Buddha
People's Republic of China · 4.4 km from Leshan29.547° N 103.769° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by christels from Pixabay The statue was begun in the early eighth century by a monk named Hai Tong, who hoped the Buddha's presence would calm the currents that wrecked boats at the confluence. Tradition says that when funding for the work was threatened, he gouged out his own eyes to prove his sincerity.
Did you know? Seen from the river, the hills around the statue are said to form the outline of a reclining Buddha more than a kilometre long.
25 Victoria Peak
People's Republic of China · 5.3 km from Hong Kong22.275° N 114.144° E
Image by fabSB17 from Pixabay The hill was known in the colonial era as Mount Austin, and in Chinese as Tai Ping Shan. In the nineteenth century its cooler air drew wealthy Europeans, and from 1904 to 1930 the Peak Reservation Ordinance set it apart as a residential district barred to Chinese residents — a restriction that lasted in practice until 1947.
Did you know? Before the tram, residents of the Peak were carried up and down the steep slopes in sedan chairs.
26 Philosopher's Walk
Japan · 4.5 km from Kyoto35.025° N 135.796° E
David Monniaux · CC BY-SA 3.0 The path was created in 1890 as a service road when the canal, which brought water from Lake Biwa to Kyoto, was completed; it was extended in 1912. Two Kyoto University philosophers, Nishida Kitarō and Tanabe Hajime, are said to have walked it daily while working through their ideas, and the path went through several informal names in their honour before the present one was fixed in 1972.
Did you know? Near Hōnen-in a stone erected in 1981 carries a short poem by Nishida Kitarō about walking one's own road, whatever others may do.
27 Chand Baori
India27.007° N 76.606° E
Chainwit. · CC BY-SA 4.0 Stepwells were the answer of dry western India to a hard problem — how to reach water whose level swung wildly between monsoon and drought. Rather than lower a bucket, you walked down to it, and the deep shaded well also stayed several degrees cooler than the air above, making it a place to gather in summer heat.
Did you know? Besides The Fall, the well has served as a location for Indian films including Paheli, Bhool Bhulaiyaa and Bhoomi.
28 Al-Shaheed Monument
Iraq · 5 km from Baghdad33.343° N 44.446° E
Mohmmd Abd · CC0 The monument was built between 1981 and 1983 to honour Iraqi soldiers who died in the Iran–Iraq War; today it is understood more broadly as a memorial to all of Iraq's martyrs. The concept came from the sculptor Ismail Fatah Al Turk (1934–2004), one of the leading Iraqi artists of his generation, working with the architect Saman Kamal and the Baghdad Architecture Group.
Did you know? The same sculptor made Baghdad's bronze statues of the poets Abu Nuwas and Maaruf al-Rusafi.
29 Amanohashidate
Japan · 18.4 km from Maizuru35.570° N 135.192° E
663highland · CC BY 2.5 The name means roughly the bridge standing in heaven. According to the ancient gazetteer of Tango Province, the god Izanagi set up a ladder here to climb to the heavens, and it fell into the sea while he slept.
Did you know? The pines survived for centuries partly because locals gathered fallen needles and twigs as fuel, keeping the sandy soil too poor for broadleaf trees.
30 Leaning Tower of Nevyansk
Russia · 0.5 km from Nevyansk57.490° N 60.223° E
Ludvig14 · CC BY-SA 4.0 The structure is a massive square base, about 9 metres a side with walls up to 2 metres thick, topped by three octagonal tiers with balconies and a spire. The lean has a likely explanation: the tower stands near the old shore of the factory pond, and the ground settled unevenly once two thirds of the base had been built. The builders compensated by tilting the upper parts the other way, which gave the tower its curve. 85 metres.
Did you know? The walls taper dramatically with height, from about 1.8 metres thick at the base to roughly 30 centimetres at the top.
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 squares, streets and monuments in Asia?
- On our list, Gateway of India (India) ranks first, followed by Hiroshima Peace Memorial (Japan) and Terracotta Army (People's Republic of China).
- Which country has the most squares, streets and monuments in Asia?
- In our collection, the most come from Japan (8), India (6) and Russia (6).
- When was the Terracotta Army discovered?
- Farmers digging a well near Xi'an found the first fragments in 1974. The figures were buried with Qin Shi Huang, the first emperor of a unified China, who died in 210 BC.
- What is a stepwell?
- A stepwell is a well reached by flights of steps descending to the water table, common in western India. Rani ki Vav in Patan, Gujarat, built in the 11th century, is lined with hundreds of sculptures and is a UNESCO World Heritage site.
- Why was the Gateway of India built?
- It was built to commemorate the visit of King George V and Queen Mary to Bombay in 1911 and was completed in 1924. It stands on the waterfront of Mumbai harbour.
- How many squares, streets and monuments are on this list in Asia?
- The list covers 36 squares, streets and monuments in 12 countries. Japan has the most, with 8.