The Most Beautiful UNESCO-Listed Palaces in Asia
12 places in 8 countries · updated 6 October 2026
In short: By our ranking, the most beautiful UNESCO-listed palaces in Asia are Palace of the Shirvanshahs (Azerbaijan), Forbidden City (People's Republic of China) and Potala Palace (People's Republic of China). The list covers 12 UNESCO-listed palaces in 8 countries. The People's Republic of China has the most, with 3. Last updated 6 October 2026.
Asia's palaces were built to embody a cosmic order as much as to house a ruler. Chinese, Korean and Vietnamese palaces follow strict axes and gates aligned with the points of the compass; Persian and Ottoman courts unfolded through gardens, pavilions and courtyards; Tibetan and Caucasian palaces grew from their mountain sites. A UNESCO listing marks the ones that sum up a whole tradition of statecraft and craftsmanship, and many of them are listed as part of a larger historic city or landscape.
Beijing's Forbidden City, the seat of the Ming and Qing emperors, is the largest surviving palace complex in the world, and the Summer Palace sets halls, a long painted corridor and Longevity Hill around Kunming Lake. In Lhasa, the Potala Palace climbs Red Hill in white and red walls. Seoul's Changdeokgung, a Joseon palace, is admired for blending its buildings with the hills and its Secret Garden, and Hue's Imperial City was the walled seat of Vietnam's Nguyen emperors.
To the west, Istanbul's Topkapı Palace was the heart of Ottoman power for centuries, and Tehran's Golestan Palace glitters with Qajar mirror work. In Isfahan, the Chehel Sotun pavilion stands before a long reflecting pool. Azerbaijan contributes the Palace of the Shirvanshahs in Baku and the Palace of Shaki Khans with its windows of coloured glass, the Catherine Palace near St Petersburg stretches its blue baroque facade, and in the Jordanian desert the small Umayyad bathhouse of Qusayr 'Amra hides walls covered in paintings.
In this list
| # | Place | Type | Country | UNESCO |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Palace of the Shirvanshahs | Palace | Azerbaijan | ✓ |
| 2 | Forbidden City | Palace | People's Republic of China | ✓ |
| 3 | Potala Palace | Palace | People's Republic of China | ✓ |
| 4 | Imperial City of Hue | Palace | Vietnam | ✓ |
| 5 | Topkapı Palace | Palace | Turkey | ✓ |
| 6 | Golestan Palace | Palace | Iran | ✓ |
| 7 | Summer Palace, Beijing | Palace | People's Republic of China | ✓ |
| 8 | Catherine Palace, Tsarskoye Selo | Palace | Russia | ✓ |
| 9 | Palace of Shaki Khans | Palace | Azerbaijan | ✓ |
| 10 | Changdeokgung | Palace | South Korea | ✓ |
| 11 | Chehel Sotun | Palace | Iran | ✓ |
| 12 | Qusayr 'Amra | Palace | Jordan | ✓ |
01 Palace of the Shirvanshahs
Azerbaijan · 4.1 km from Baku40.366° N 49.833° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Diego Delso · CC BY-SA 4.0 The Palace of the Shirvanshahs crowns the highest point of Baku's walled Old City, a compact ensemble of stone buildings from the fifteenth century. The Shirvanshahs were the long-lived dynasty of Shirvan, and under Ibrahim I they moved their capital to Baku after an earthquake devastated their old seat at Shamakhi.
Did you know? The main palace building originally had 52 rooms, 27 on the ground floor and 25 above, linked by three narrow spiral staircases.
02 Forbidden City
People's Republic of China · 1.6 km from Beijing39.916° N 116.391° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
N509FZ · CC BY-SA 4.0 For almost five centuries the Forbidden City was the physical centre of the Chinese state. The Yongle Emperor of the Ming dynasty began it in 1406, after moving the capital from Nanjing to Beijing, and the complex was ready by 1420; from then until 1912 twenty-four emperors, fourteen Ming and ten Qing, lived and ruled here.
Did you know? The legend of 9,999 rooms is not borne out by surveys, which count about 8,886 bays of rooms.
03 Potala Palace
People's Republic of China · 2.2 km from Lhasa29.658° N 91.117° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by nrxfly from Pixabay The hill the palace stands on has been sacred longer than the palace itself. Tradition holds that in 637, Songtsen Gampo — the Tibetan king credited with unifying the plateau — built the first palace on this outcrop, known as Marpo Ri, or the Red Hill, to mark his marriage to the Chinese princess Wencheng.
Did you know? Copper was poured into the foundations to help the palace withstand earthquakes, and its sloping walls are about 5 metres thick at the base.
04 Imperial City of Hue
Vietnam · 0.2 km from Huế16.469° N 107.578° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
This Photo was taken by Supanut Arunoprayote . Feel free to use any of my images, but please mention me as the author and may send me a message. (สามารถใช้ภาพได้อิสระ แต่กรุณาใส่เครดิตผู้ถ่ายและอาจส่ง ข้อความบอกกล่าวด้วย ) Please do not upload an updated image here without consultation with the Author. The author would like to make corrections only at his own source. This ensures that the changes are preserved. Please if you think that any changes should be required, please inform the author. Otherwise you can upload a new image with a new name. Please use one of the templates derivative or extract . · CC BY 4.0 When Nguyễn Phúc Ánh unified Vietnam in 1802 and took the name Gia Long, he chose Huế, the old seat of his family, as the capital, and set about building a court on the model of Beijing's Forbidden City inside a European-style fortress. The result is three enclosures, one inside the other, on the north bank of the Perfume River.
Did you know? On the night of 5 July 1885, after a failed attack on the French, Emperor Hàm Nghi was spirited out of the citadel to lead a guerrilla resistance.
05 Topkapı Palace
Turkey · 1 km from Istanbul41.013° N 28.984° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by falco from Pixabay For almost four centuries the Ottoman Empire was governed from a headland at the very tip of old Istanbul. Mehmed II began Topkapı Palace in 1459, a few years after taking Constantinople, on Seraglio Point, where the Golden Horn opens into the Bosphorus and both meet the Sea of Marmara.
Did you know? The palace stands on the site of the acropolis of ancient Byzantion, and parts of its outer walls date back to Byzantine times.
06 Golestan Palace
Iran · 0.7 km from Tehran35.680° N 51.420° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Parsa 2au · CC BY-SA 4.0 Golestan, the "Palace of Flowers", is what remains of the walled citadel around which Tehran grew into a capital. Its core goes back to the Safavid period, when Shah Tahmasp I built a fortified enclosure here in the sixteenth century and Abbas the Great later added a garden.
Did you know? Between 1925 and 1945 much of the palace complex was demolished, as Reza Shah held that old royal buildings should not block a modern Tehran.
07 Summer Palace, Beijing
People's Republic of China · 15.1 km from Beijing39.998° N 116.269° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by hhach from Pixabay The Summer Palace is a landscape painting made with water, earth and timber. 9 square kilometres is Kunming Lake, a body of water dug by hand, and the spoil was heaped up to shape Longevity Hill, about 60 metres high, along its northern shore.
Did you know? An imperial palace stood on this site as early as 1153, when the Jin dynasty built one here.
08 Catherine Palace, Tsarskoye Selo
Russia · 25.5 km from Saint Petersburg59.716° N 30.396° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Игорь Гордеев · CC BY-SA 4.0 The Catherine Palace is the Russian Baroque at its most exuberant: a facade some 300 metres long, painted sky blue, lined with snow-white columns and pilasters, and crowned with gilded ornament on which almost 100 kg of gold was spent. It stands at Tsarskoye Selo, the imperial country estate south of St Petersburg, which Peter the Great gave to his wife, the future Catherine I, in 1710.
Did you know? In 1773 Catherine the Great had the gilding on the north facade's stucco painted over in olive drab, ending the original glitter of the facade.
09 Palace of Shaki Khans
Azerbaijan · 2.6 km from Shaki41.204° N 47.198° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Rüfət Həsənli · CC BY 4.0 The Palace of Shaki Khans is a small two-storey pavilion inside the walls of the old fortress of Sheki, in the foothills of the Greater Caucasus in north-western Azerbaijan. It was the summer residence of the rulers of the Shaki Khanate and is usually dated to 1797, under Muhammad Husayn Khan Mushtaq. In 2019 the historic centre of Sheki, including the palace, was inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
Did you know? Its date is debated: a 1946 article credited it to a Shiraz builder in 1790, yet Sheki celebrated the palace's 250th anniversary in 2012.
10 Changdeokgung
South Korea · 1.4 km from Seoul37.579° N 126.992° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by HeungSoon from Pixabay Changdeokgung, the "Palace of Prospering Virtue", was meant to be the lesser of Seoul's royal residences, yet for much of the Joseon era it was the one the kings actually preferred. King Taejong ordered it in 1404 as a secondary palace, and the first buildings were ready in 1405.
Did you know? Taejong, who founded the palace, spent most of the rest of his reign living here rather than in the official main palace, Gyeongbokgung.
11 Chehel Sotun
Iran · 5.5 km from Isfahan32.657° N 51.672° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Zenith210 ( talk ) ( Uploads ) · CC BY-SA 3.0 Chehel Sotoun, the "Forty Columns", is a Safavid palace pavilion set in a walled garden in the centre of Isfahan, the city whose old boast was that it was "half the world".
Did you know? Chehel Sotoun was entered on Iran's national heritage list in 1932, nearly eighty years before UNESCO recognition.
12 Qusayr 'Amra
Jordan31.802° N 36.587° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by LoggaWiggler from Pixabay From the road across the eastern Jordanian desert, Qusayr ʿAmra looks like almost nothing — a small, low building of limestone and basalt with a triple-vaulted hall and a small bath wing. Inside, it holds the most important surviving cycle of early Islamic painting.
Did you know? In the painted sky of the hot room, the lines radiate correctly from the north celestial pole, but the stars run in mirror image, hinting at a copied flat model.
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 UNESCO-listed palaces in Asia?
- On our list, Palace of the Shirvanshahs (Azerbaijan) ranks first, followed by Forbidden City (People's Republic of China) and Potala Palace (People's Republic of China).
- Which country has the most UNESCO-listed palaces in Asia?
- In our collection, the most come from the People's Republic of China (3), Azerbaijan (2) and Iran (2).
- Why is the Chehel Sotun called the Palace of Forty Columns?
- The name means forty columns in Persian, although the pavilion has twenty slender wooden columns. Reflected in the long pool in front of it, they appear to double to forty.
- What is special about the windows of the Palace of Shaki Khans?
- Its windows are shebeke, lattices of small wooden pieces fitted together without nails or glue and filled with coloured glass. The 18th-century palace is the centrepiece of the historic centre of Shaki, a World Heritage Site.
- What are the paintings in Qusayr 'Amra?
- The 8th-century Umayyad bathhouse is covered with frescoes of hunting scenes, bathers, musicians and rulers, and one of its domes shows a map of the night sky with the constellations of the zodiac. It is among the earliest surviving examples of Islamic secular art.
- How many UNESCO-listed palaces are on this list in Asia?
- The list covers 12 UNESCO-listed palaces in 8 countries. The People's Republic of China has the most, with 3.