The Most Beautiful Temples in Asia

70 places in 17 countries · updated 13 October 2026

1. 01 Angkor Wat

   Cambodia · 5.4 km from Siem Reap13.412° N 103.867° E

   • UNESCO World Heritage

   

   The plan is a model of the Hindu cosmos. A moat 190 metres wide, over 5 km around, stands for the ocean. An outer wall about 1,024 by 802 metres encloses the grounds. Inside, three galleries rise one above another towards five lotus-bud towers arranged in a quincunx, the image of Mount Meru. Most of the visible stone is sandstone quarried at Mount Kulen and probably floated in along canals. It is laid over a vast mound of earth fill, with laterite used in the outer wall and hidden parts. The outer gallery carries almost 1,000 square metres of bas-reliefs.

   Did you know? In 2011 researchers found traces of a 35 km canal linking the Kulen quarries to the temple, a shorter route for hauling the stone.

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2. 02 Itsukushima Shrine

   Japan · 15.2 km from Hiroshima34.296° N 132.320° E

   

   Tradition dates the first shrine to 593. Its present form comes from 1168, when Taira no Kiyomori, leader of the ascendant Heike clan, rebuilt it on a lavish scale in honour of the three goddesses of the sea enshrined here, daughters of the storm god Susanoo. The buildings follow shinden-zukuri, the palace style of Heian-period aristocrats, with gently curving roofs and open verandas; the east and west corridors together run for about 195 metres. On the water between them sits a Noh stage, said to be the only one in Japan built over the sea, where the tide changes how the performance sounds.

   Did you know? Its two camphor main pillars came from trees found far from Hiroshima, one in Miyazaki Prefecture on Kyushu and the other in Kagawa Prefecture on Shikoku.

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3. 03 Prambanan Temple

   Indonesia · 13.2 km from Yogyakarta City7.752° S 110.491° E

   • UNESCO World Heritage

   

   That's folklore, not archaeology, but it did real historical work: the association of the ruins with a cursed, vengeful princess made pre-colonial Javanese communities wary of the site, which is part of why a temple complex this large sat neglected for so long before serious excavation and restoration began.

   Did you know? The compound originally held 240 temples, including 224 identical small shrines laid out in four concentric square rows of 44, 52, 60 and 68.

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4. 04 Bulguksa

   South Korea · 12.4 km from Gyeongju35.790° N 129.332° E

   

   The genius of Bulguksa is in its stone, not its timber. The wooden halls burned during the Japanese invasions of the 1590s and were rebuilt many times, most recently in a large restoration in 1969–73, but the Silla platforms, balustrades and stairways survive. The temple is raised on a massive stone terrace, and visitors once entered paradise by climbing the stone stair-bridges set into its face: Cheongungyo and Baegungyo, the Blue Cloud and White Cloud bridges, rising in two flights to the gate of the main precinct, and beside them the smaller Lotus and Seven Treasures bridges leading to the Hall of Supreme Bliss.

   Did you know? Dabotap once had stone lions at all four corners; three vanished, along with its reliquaries, when the pagoda was dismantled under Japanese rule in the 1920s.

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5. 05 Konark Sun Temple

   India · 21.7 km from Puri19.887° N 86.095° E

   • UNESCO World Heritage

   

   What stands today is the jagamohana, the great assembly hall, rising in three receding tiers of stepped roofs. The main sanctum behind it, whose tower is estimated to have been about 70 m high, collapsed in 1837, and the cause of the temple's decline is still debated. In 1903, to stop the hall from falling, the colonial authorities sealed it and filled it with sand; in September 2022 the Archaeological Survey of India began removing the sand to reinforce the structure from inside. Seen from the sea, the dark mass of the temple was a landmark for sailors, who called it the Black Pagoda as early as 1676, in contrast to the White Pagoda of the Jagannath temple at Puri.

   Did you know? Unusually for a Hindu temple, its planning and building records survived on palm-leaf manuscripts in Sanskrit, written in Odia script and found in a village in the 1960s.

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6. 06 Harmandir Sahib

   India · 2.6 km from Amritsar31.620° N 74.877° E

   

   The pool was completed under the fourth Guru, Ram Das, in 1577, and the fifth, Guru Arjan, built the first brick shrine in its centre, finished in 1589; in 1604 he installed the first compilation of Sikh scripture inside. Because the site was the spiritual centre of the community, it was repeatedly attacked: Mughal governors and Afghan armies desecrated it, filled the pool, and in 1762 Ahmad Shah Durrani had the shrine blown up. Sikhs rebuilt it each time, and the present sanctum, causeway and gateway date from the 1760s and 1770s. Maharaja Ranjit Singh refaced the building in marble and copper in 1809 and in 1830 had the sanctum overlaid with gold leaf, the origin of the English name.

   Did you know? The sacred scripture spends about 20 hours a day in the sanctum and the remaining four in its own bedroom on the first floor of the Akal Takht.

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7. 07 Tanah Lot

   Indonesia · 14.9 km from Denpasar8.621° S 115.087° E

   

   The temple's guardian isn't only mythical. Nirartha is said to have created a venomous sea snake from his own scarf to protect the shrine, and a real snake — a banded, black-and-white species related to kraits — is kept in a small grotto at the site to this day, tended by a caretaker who lets visitors have it draped briefly over their hands as a blessing. It's one of the rare cases where a creation myth and an actual living animal occupy the same few square metres.

   Did you know? The temple's main deity is Dewa Baruna, also called Bhatara Segara, the god of the sea, and the priest Nirartha is venerated there as well.

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8. 08 Lotus Temple

   India · 7.7 km from New Delhi28.553° N 77.259° E

   

   Building that image at full scale took nearly ten years. The structure's 27 marble-clad petals aren't decorative panels bolted onto a frame — they're thin-shell concrete structures engineered to be self-supporting, arranged in three overlapping ranks of nine that also satisfy the strict nine-sided geometry required of every Bahá'í house of worship. Getting curved, load-bearing concrete shells clad in Greek Pentelic marble to hold that shape without visible joints or supports was, at the time, a genuinely difficult engineering problem rather than a simple sculptural exercise.

   Did you know? Each entrance and outer petal was cast in one continuous pour lasting about 48 hours, because any pause would have left a permanent mark.

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9. 09 Potala Palace

   People's Republic of China · 2.2 km from Lhasa29.658° N 91.117° E

   • UNESCO World Heritage

   

   What stands today began in 1645 under the Fifth Dalai Lama, and the pace of the two halves of the project tells its own story. The White Palace — the residential and administrative wing — went up remarkably fast, its exterior finished in about three years. The Red Palace, the religious heart of the complex devoted to the study of Buddhism and to the funerary stupas of past Dalai Lamas, took far longer: interior work and decoration stretched across roughly 45 years. The Fifth Dalai Lama died in 1682, over a decade before the Red Palace was finished in 1694, and his regent, Desi Sangye Gyatso, kept the project moving to completion in his name.

   Did you know? The palace holds more than 1,000 rooms, some 10,000 shrines and around 200,000 statues.

   More about Potala Palace →

10. 10 Kiyomizu-dera

    Japan · 5.3 km from Kyoto34.995° N 135.785° E

    • UNESCO World Heritage

    

    The complex has burned many times. The present main hall, a National Treasure, was rebuilt in 1633 with money from the shogun Tokugawa Iemitsu, and most of the surrounding buildings, including the three-storey pagoda of 1632, date from the same decades. The hall's great wooden stage projects over the hillside on a lattice of tall pillars, a technique called kakezukuri, and no nails were used in the whole structure. The stage looks out over the treetops to the city.

    Did you know? The stage rests on 139 pillars of zelkova wood, and its floor is made of 410 cypress boards.

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11. 11 Temple of Heaven

    People's Republic of China · 2.4 km from Beijing39.882° N 116.407° E

    • UNESCO World Heritage

    

    The plan works through a simple opposition: heaven is round, earth is square. The outer wall is curved at its northern end and squared off at the southern one, and the chief buildings are circular structures set in square courts. The Hall of Prayer for Good Harvests is the image everyone knows, a triple-roofed timber rotunda about 36 metres across and 38 metres high on three marble terraces, built without nails. Its columns are counted out symbolically: four inner ones for the seasons, and two rings of twelve for the months and the traditional divisions of the day. The present hall is a reconstruction; the original was destroyed when lightning set it alight in 1889.

    Did you know? The round stone at the altar's centre is called the Heart of Heaven, and the surrounding balustrades bounce a speaker's voice back so prayers seem to resonate.

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12. 12 Mỹ Sơn Sanctuary

    Vietnam · 35.5 km from Da Nang15.763° N 108.124° E

    • UNESCO World Heritage

    

    More than seventy temples once filled the valley. The central type is the kalan, a brick tower-sanctuary that sheltered a linga, accompanied by a mandapa, or entrance hall, a kosagrha, a small building that served as a store or fire-house, and a gopura, or gateway tower. Exactly how the Cham builders made and bonded their fine red bricks is still only partly understood. Unusually for the region, even the decorative carving was cut straight into the brick walls rather than into stone panels set into them.

    Did you know? The first temples were largely of timber and burned in a great fire around 535–536; King Sambhuvarman rebuilt the sanctuary early in the 7th century.

    More about Mỹ Sơn Sanctuary →

13. 13 Borobudur Temple

    Indonesia · 15.5 km from Magelang7.608° S 110.204° E

    • UNESCO World Heritage

    

    And then it disappeared. As Hindu-Buddhist power in Java faded and Islam spread through the archipelago from the 14th century on, the temple was abandoned, and ash from eruptions of nearby Mount Merapi combined with jungle growth to bury it almost entirely. It survived in local memory mostly as rumour rather than a place anyone visited.

    Did you know? Some of the hidden reliefs carry short inscriptions that seem to be instructions to the sculptors about which scenes to carve.

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14. 14 Tōdai-ji Temple

    Japan · 35.3 km from Ōtsu34.689° N 135.840° E

    • UNESCO World Heritage

    

    Casting it took nine years and, by some estimates, the labour of over two and a half million people at a time when Japan's entire population was a small fraction of what it is now. The statue was built up in stages from the bottom, pouring roughly 500 tons of molten bronze in successive castings around a wooden and clay armature. Gilding the finished figure took a great deal of gold, and when gold was reported in northern Japan in 749, during the work, the court greeted the find as a sign of heaven’s approval.

    Did you know? Until 1998 the Great Buddha Hall was the largest wooden building in the world.

    More about Tōdai-ji Temple →

15. 15 Temple of the Tooth

    Sri Lanka · 3.5 km from Kandy7.294° N 80.641° E

    

    According to legend, the relic was carried to the island in the 4th century from the Indian kingdom of Kalinga by Princess Hemamali, who hid it in her hair, and her brother Prince Dantha. From then on its guardianship was bound up with the right to rule, so each royal capital — Anuradhapura, Polonnaruwa, Dambadeniya, Kotte — built a tooth temple near the palace. After a period in hiding, the relic was brought to Kandy, where Vimaladharmasuriya I built a first shrine at the end of the 16th century.

    Did you know? On reaching the island in the 4th century, the tooth was first enshrined at Meghagiri Vihara, today's Isurumuniya, in Anuradhapura.

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16. 16 Kinkaku-ji Temple

    Japan · 2 km from Kyoto35.039° N 135.728° E

    • UNESCO World Heritage

    

    What stands there now isn't the original building. On 2 July 1950, a 22-year-old novice monk named Hayashi Shoken set fire to the pavilion and then attempted suicide on the hillside behind it; he survived, was sentenced to prison, and was released early after his mental illness was recognized, dying of tuberculosis not long after. The event became famous well beyond Japan's Buddhist community because the novelist Yukio Mishima turned it into the basis of his 1956 novel The Temple of the Golden Pavilion, which explores the monk's motives at a depth the historical record never fully settled.

    Did you know? The temple's official name is Rokuon-ji, the Deer Garden Temple, taken from Yoshimitsu's posthumous name and recalling the deer park where the Buddha first preached.

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17. 17 Wat Rong Khun

    Thailand · 11.7 km from Chiang Rai19.824° N 99.763° E

    

    Everything here is an allegory, and the approach is designed as a journey. Visitors cross a bridge past hundreds of outstretched sculpted hands, an image of unchecked desire, on a path meant to lead towards happiness by giving up greed and temptation, and then pass through a gate guarded by the figures of Death and Rahu before arriving at the ubosot, the ordination hall. White stands for the mind and spiritual merit, and the building takes the familiar layered roofs and ornament of Thai temple architecture and pushes them into something closer to a dream. By contrast, the richly gilded building on the grounds, which houses the toilets, stands for worldly desire and the pull of money.

    Did you know? To keep the project free of outside influence, individual donations are capped at 10,000 baht.

    More about Wat Rong Khun →

18. 18 Mahabodhi Temple

    India · 11.5 km from Gaya24.696° N 84.991° E

    • UNESCO World Heritage

    

    Ashoka's own shrine has vanished, and the building you see is essentially of the Gupta period, the 5th to 6th century, though parts may be older still. It is a rare survival: a brick temple faced with stucco, a far less durable material than stone. Its main tower, over 55 m high, is a straight-sided pyramid of stepped niches crowned by a small stupa, a design that influenced the shape of later Hindu temples in India and Buddhist towers across Asia. Around it runs a sandstone railing begun around 150 BC and carved with medallions and scenes; most of the original posts are now in museums, including the site museum beside the temple, and have been replaced with copies.

    Did you know? A terracotta plaque found at Kumrahar in Patna, dated to about 150–200 AD, shows an earlier version of the temple with a similar tower.

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19. 19 Modhera Sun Temple

    India23.584° N 72.133° E

    

    The first is the kunda, a rectangular stepped tank roughly 54 by 37 metres, its four terraces descending in a fractal cascade of small steps and miniature shrines towards the water. It reads almost like a sculpture in its own right, and in still weather it doubles the temple in reflection. Above it stands the sabhamandapa, an assembly or dance hall with no walls at all, held up by 52 pillars carved from base to capital with dancers, deities and scenes in dense, crisp sandstone relief.

    Did you know? In 1024–25 a force of around 20,000 soldiers tried and failed to halt Mahmud of Ghazni at Modhera; some historians think the temple commemorates that stand.

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20. 20 Wat Chaiwatthanaram

    Thailand · 3.3 km from Phra Nakhon Si Ayutthaya14.343° N 100.542° E

    

    The plan is a diagram in brick. The central prang, about 35 metres tall, rises from a raised platform with four smaller prangs around it; the whole is enclosed by a cross-shaped gallery punctuated by eight chapels shaped like chedis, known as the Meru, a name taken from the mountain at the centre of the Buddhist cosmos. The borrowing from Khmer architecture gives the temple a stepped, radiating geometry that looks different from every side.

    Did you know? Two of the chedis, distinguished by twelve indented corners, are believed to have held the ashes of the king's mother.

    More about Wat Chaiwatthanaram →

21. 21 Besakih

    Indonesia · 39.8 km from Denpasar8.374° S 115.452° E

    

    Besakih is not a single building but a family of 23 related temples spread over the slope. At its heart is Pura Penataran Agung, laid out on six terraces that climb the hillside. Visitors pass first through a candi bentar, the split gateway typical of Balinese temples, and then through the taller Kori Agung, the inner gate. The courtyards above hold multi-tiered meru towers with stacked roofs of palm fibre, pavilions for offerings and a padmasana, a lotus throne for the supreme deity, which dates from around the seventeenth century.

    Did you know? The interrupted Eka Dasa Rudra was performed again in full in 1979, its climax drawing thousands of pilgrims and Indonesia's national leaders to the mountain.

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22. 22 Pura Ulun Danu Bratan

    Indonesia · 18.9 km from Singaraja8.271° S 115.167° E

    

    The temple is dedicated to Dewi Danu, goddess of the waters, lakes and rivers, and its purpose is deeply practical as well as spiritual. The lake is the source of water for the farmland of the whole region below it, and downstream stand many smaller water temples, each belonging to a local irrigation association. Ritual use of the site is thought to reach back to prehistoric times, but the temple in its present form is linked to the royal house of Mengwi: chronicles credit I Gusti Agung Putu, founder of the Taman Ayun temple at Mengwi, and the rebuilding is dated to 1633.

    Did you know? The lake is Bali's second largest, about 3.8 square kilometres in area, yet no more than about 22 metres deep.

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23. 23 Meenakshi Temple

    India · 0.3 km from Madurai9.920° N 78.119° E

    

    What's standing today is largely not ancient in the way it looks. The temple complex was almost completely destroyed in 1310 during Malik Kafur's Deccan campaign for the Delhi Sultanate, and most of what visitors walk through now — including the towering gopurams — was rebuilt between the 14th and 17th centuries under Vijayanagara and Nayak rulers, especially Tirumalai Nayak. The temple's ancient roots are real, but its visible fabric is, by monument standards, a relatively late reconstruction on old foundations.

    Did you know? Some of the temple's stone pillars are musical: struck lightly, each one rings with its own distinct note.

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24. 24 Ziggurat of Ur

    Iraq · 18.1 km from Nasiriya30.962° N 46.102° E

    

    It was raised in the 21st century BC by Ur-Nammu, founder of the Third Dynasty of Ur, and completed under his successor Shulgi, under whom Ur became the capital of a state controlling much of Mesopotamia. The ziggurat was the centrepiece of a temple complex devoted to Nanna, the moon god and patron of the city, which also served as its administrative heart. The base measured about 64 by 45 metres, and the original tower probably stood over 30 metres high, though only its lower part survives. By the 6th century BC it had decayed, and Nabonidus, the last king of the Neo-Babylonian Empire, rebuilt it — in seven stages rather than the original three.

    Did you know? Its builder is known for certain because many of the bricks are stamped with the name of Ur-Nammu.

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25. 25 Pashupatinath Temple

    Nepal · 3.5 km from Kathmandu27.710° N 85.349° E

    • UNESCO World Heritage

    

    The main temple is only the heart of a precinct of about 246 hectares containing more than 500 smaller temples, shrines, ashrams and inscriptions, raised over the centuries along both banks of the river. UNESCO lists it as one of the seven monument groups of the Kathmandu Valley World Heritage Site, inscribed in 1979. The riverbank also holds a Rama temple of the 14th century, and the Guhyeshwari Temple, sacred to the goddess, which is mentioned in an 11th-century manuscript. Buddhists revere the area too, linking it to great masters such as Padmasambhava.

    Did you know? By long tradition attributed to Adi Shankaracharya, the chief priests are Bhatta Brahmins from Karnataka in southern India, not Nepalis.

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26. 26 Brihadisvara Temple, Thanjavur

    India · 2.4 km from Thanjavur10.783° N 79.132° E

    • UNESCO World Heritage

    

    The complex is a long rectangle of roughly 240 by 120 metres, entered from the east through two stone gateways, the second more richly carved than the first. Inside, a colonnaded cloister about 450 metres around encloses the courtyard. A monolithic Nandi, some 6 metres long and 25 tonnes in weight, faces the sanctum from its own pavilion; the lingam inside, which only priests may approach, is almost 9 metres tall and among the largest in India. Later dynasties added shrines to Parvati, Murugan and others, and the French, who used the temple as an arsenal in 1777, gave it its outer defensive wall.

    Did you know? For the temple's thousandth anniversary in 2010, a thousand Bharatanatyam dancers performed together to hymns composed by Karuvurar, Rajaraja's guru.

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27. 27 Chennakeshava Temple, Belur

    India13.163° N 75.861° E

    

    The building itself is compact, set on a raised platform with a stepped, star-like outline that multiplies the corners of the walls and gives every surface its own play of light and shadow. The stone is a fine-grained chloritic schist, often called soapstone, which allowed the carvers an almost jeweller's precision. On the outer walls some eighty large reliefs of gods and goddesses stand above bands of friezes, and under the eaves lean the madanikas, bracket figures of dancers, musicians and women at their toilette, originally forty and now thirty-eight. They reward close looking: every face, bangle and fold of cloth was worked separately.

    Did you know? Local tradition holds that the tower of the small Somyanayaki shrine in the courtyard is a miniature copy of the lost main tower.

    More about Chennakeshava Temple, Belur →

28. 28 Jokhang

    People's Republic of China · 3.2 km from Lhasa29.653° N 91.132° E

    • UNESCO World Heritage

    

    The temple was enlarged many times over the following nine centuries, and the complex now combines a Gelug monastery with the original temple, rising four storeys under gilded roofs. It faces west onto Barkhor Square. Two stone pillars by the entrance carry an edict of 1794, part of which Tibetans have chiselled away in the belief that the stone itself heals. Inside, a ring of large prayer wheels leads to the main shrine, surrounded by chapels; pilgrims prostrate themselves on the worn flagstones and queue to lay white scarves before the Jowo. The Potala Palace is about 1 km to the west.

    Did you know? A small pond inside the complex is said to be fed by the remains of that ancient lake.

    More about Jokhang →

29. 29 Garni Temple

    Armenia · 20.1 km from Yerevan40.112° N 44.729° E

    

    Look closely at the details. The blocks, some weighing up to five tonnes, were laid without mortar and held together with iron and bronze clamps. A frieze of acanthus scrolls runs around the building, lion heads project from the cornice, and on the pedestals flanking the stairway the figure of Atlas strains as if carrying the temple on his shoulders. The stair itself is unusual: nine steps, each about twice the normal height, so that reaching the doorway takes a deliberate effort — and the facade faces north rather than east. Inside, the cella is lit only by the tall doorway and an opening in the roof.

    Did you know? The 1679 earthquake had its epicentre in the Garni Gorge, and the colonnade split diagonally, flinging blocks up to 50 metres away.

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30. 30 Preah Vihear Temple

    Cambodia14.391° N 104.680° E

    • UNESCO World Heritage

    

    Unlike most Khmer temples, which unfold in concentric enclosures around a central tower, Preah Vihear runs in a single line about 800 metres long, climbing from north to south up the slope of the ridge. A pilgrim's way of stairs and causeways passes through five gopuras, or gateway pavilions, each set higher than the last, each opening onto a new courtyard, until the path reaches the main sanctuary at the cliff's edge.

    Did you know? The five gateways are numbered from the sanctuary outwards, so visitors meet gopura five first, and each one hides the next, so the whole complex is never visible at once.

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