The Most Beautiful Terraced Landscapes in Asia
6 places in 5 countries · updated 13 October 2026
In short: By our ranking, the most beautiful terraced landscapes in Asia are Longji Rice Terraces (People's Republic of China), Honghe Hani Rice Terraces (People's Republic of China) and Banaue Rice Terraces (Philippines). The list covers 6 terraced landscapes in 5 countries. The People's Republic of China has the most, with 2. Last updated 13 October 2026.
Terraced landscapes are at their most extraordinary in monsoon Asia, where wet rice demands level, flooded fields and the land offers mostly steep slopes. Over centuries, farming communities cut mountainsides into staircases of paddies held up by earth and stone walls, and built channels that carry water from forested ridges down through hundreds of fields in turn. The result is a landscape that is both engineering and social contract: a terrace system survives only as long as the villages that share its water keep maintaining it.
In southern China the Longji terraces of Guangxi, known as the Dragon's Backbone, coil around the hills of Zhuang and Yao villages, while the Honghe Hani terraces in Yunnan descend the Ailao Mountains in thousands of mirror-like pools, part of a system of forest, village, terrace and water that the Hani have managed for more than a millennium. On the island of Luzon, the Banaue terraces were carved by the Ifugao into the Cordillera, and on Bali the Jatiluwih fields are watered by subak, a cooperative irrigation system governed through water temples.
The form travels well beyond rice in the mountains. Shiroyone Senmaida on Japan's Noto Peninsula packs about a thousand tiny paddies onto a slope that runs straight down to the Sea of Japan. In South Korea, the Daehan Dawon plantation near Boseong applies the same contour logic to tea, its clipped green rows following every curve of the hillside.
In this list
| # | Place | Type | Country | UNESCO |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Longji Rice Terraces | Terraced fields | People's Republic of China | |
| 2 | Honghe Hani Rice Terraces | Terraced fields | People's Republic of China | |
| 3 | Banaue Rice Terraces | Terraced fields | Philippines | |
| 4 | Jatiluwih Rice Terraces | Terraced fields | Indonesia | |
| 5 | Shiroyone Senmaida | Terraced fields | Japan | |
| 6 | Daehan Dawon Boseong Green tea Plantation | Terraced fields | South Korea |
01 Longji Rice Terraces
People's Republic of China25.755° N 110.133° E
Image by mercierzeng from Pixabay Work on the terraces is generally dated to the Yuan dynasty in the 13th–14th centuries, and the carving continued into the early Qing period. They are still farmed, and that is what keeps them alive. Two peoples tend the two best-known areas: Zhuang families around Ping'an, and Yao communities around Dazhai and Jinkeng. The wooden stilt houses of their villages sit right among the paddies, and the paths between them are the same paths the farmers use. In nearby Huangluo, Yao women keep a tradition of growing their hair extraordinarily long, cutting it only once in a lifetime.
Did you know? The terraces rise in as many as 1,100 tiers, with a vertical drop of more than 860 metres from the lowest paddy to the highest.
02 Honghe Hani Rice Terraces
People's Republic of China23.117° N 102.738° E
Jialiang Gao , www.peace-on-earth.org · CC BY-SA 3.0 The terraces are the work of the Hani people, who have farmed these slopes for well over a thousand years, and their real achievement is a system rather than a view. The forested summits above about 2,000 metres catch the clouds and feed springs; villages of a few dozen households sit in the middle band, below the woods; and the paddies spill downhill beneath them, fed by a web of channels that carries water from field to field all the way to the bottom. UNESCO inscribed the cultural landscape in 2013, with a core area of more than 16,000 hectares around Yuanyang County, and the wider terraced country continues into neighbouring Honghe, Jinping and Lüchun counties.
Did you know? Four trunk canals and 392 branch ditches, together about 446 kilometres long, carry water through the core terraced area and are maintained communally.
03 Banaue Rice Terraces
Philippines16.935° N 121.135° E
Image by lester56 from Pixabay They were built and are still worked by the Ifugao, and the extraordinary thing about them is that they are a living system rather than a ruin. Water is gathered in the rainforest on the ridges above and led down through a network of channels from one paddy to the next, so that the forest, the terraces and the villages form a single landscape that only works as long as all three are tended. Rice farming here is bound up with an elaborate cycle of rituals and celebrations tied to the agricultural year.
Did you know? The terraces were built with minimal tools, largely by hand, their walls raised from stone and rammed earth and fed by a canal at the top.
04 Jatiluwih Rice Terraces
Indonesia · 28.1 km from Singaraja8.367° S 115.131° E
Imacim · CC BY-SA 4.0 The terraces exist because of the subak, the cooperative system of water management that has distributed irrigation across Bali for roughly a thousand years. Water from the mountain is channelled through canals and shared field by field, with decisions about planting and flooding taken collectively by farmers' associations and tied to the island's water temples. The system is the practical expression of Tri Hita Karana, the Balinese principle of harmony between people, nature and the divine. In 2012 Jatiluwih became part of the UNESCO World Heritage property Cultural Landscape of Bali Province: the Subak System as a Manifestation of the Tri Hita Karana Philosophy.
Did you know? That landscape now groups 17 major subak associations and 12 customary villages across the districts of Tabanan and Buleleng.
05 Shiroyone Senmaida
Japan37.425° N 137.000° E
Totti · CC BY-SA 4.0 The fields are a product of the Kaga domain. After Maeda Toshiie received Noto Province in 1581, land clearance was encouraged, and around 1632 the Taniyama and Sasora irrigation channels were dug to bring river water to this slope. A great landslide in 1684 and an earthquake in 1729 destroyed much of the work, and part of the ground lay abandoned until the Meiji era, when the local salt-making trade declined and farmers rebuilt the terraces into roughly their present form. Volunteers and an owner programme now help the community keep the paddies under rice, since only active cultivation preserves the landscape.
Did you know? One theory holds that the name Senmaida comes not only from the count of plots but from an old word for narrow fields that drifted into 'thousand'.
06 Daehan Dawon Boseong Green tea Plantation
South Korea34.715° N 127.079° E
Image by YHBae from Pixabay The estate has a relatively recent history set against a very old crop. Tea in Korea is recorded as far back as the Silla period in the 7th century, but large-scale cultivation in Boseong only began in the 1930s. The tea company behind Daehan Dawon traces its origins to 1939; in 1957 its founder, Jang Yeong-seop, acquired the forested slopes at Bongsan-ri and began planting tea alongside cedar, cypress and bamboo. Over the following decades the plantation grew into the biggest in the county, and in 1994 it was licensed as a tourist farm while remaining private, working land. A television advertisement filmed among the terraces in 1997 made the place famous across the country.
Did you know? Boseong County supplies roughly 40 percent of South Korea's tea, and almost a third of the country's tea farmland lies within it.
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 terraced landscapes in Asia?
- On our list, Longji Rice Terraces (People's Republic of China) ranks first, followed by Honghe Hani Rice Terraces (People's Republic of China) and Banaue Rice Terraces (Philippines).
- Which country has the most terraced landscapes in Asia?
- In our collection, the most come from the People's Republic of China (2), Indonesia (1) and Japan (1).
- Why are rice terraces built on mountainsides?
- Wet rice grows in standing water, which needs level fields. Terracing turns steep slopes into flat steps that hold water, reduce soil erosion and let irrigation flow from one field down to the next.
- How old are the Banaue Rice Terraces?
- Their age is debated. They are traditionally said to be around two thousand years old, but recent archaeological research suggests that many of the Ifugao terraces were built much later, within the last few centuries.
- What is the subak system in Bali?
- Subak is a traditional Balinese system of cooperative water management, organised around water temples, that distributes irrigation water among rice farmers. The cultural landscape of the subak, including Jatiluwih, was inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2012.
- How many terraced landscapes are on this list in Asia?
- The list covers 6 terraced landscapes in 5 countries. The People's Republic of China has the most, with 2.