The Most Beautiful UNESCO-Listed Squares, Streets and Monuments in Asia
13 places in 9 countries · updated 6 October 2026
In short: By our ranking, the most beautiful UNESCO-listed squares, streets and monuments in Asia are Hiroshima Peace Memorial (Japan), Terracotta Army (People's Republic of China) and Qutb complex (India). The list covers 13 UNESCO-listed squares, streets and monuments in 9 countries. The People's Republic of China has the most, with 3. Last updated 6 October 2026.
Asia holds the longest record of monumental building on Earth, and its UNESCO-listed monuments span almost all of it: from stone circles raised before farming to a ruined exhibition hall that became the symbol of the atomic age. What the inscription adds is a claim of universal meaning. These are not only the most decorated squares and towers of their cities, but places that mark turning points, from the birth of an empire to the end of a war, and that the whole world is asked to keep.
Göbekli Tepe in southeastern Turkey, with its carved T-shaped pillars, is older than any known city, and the Plain of Jars in Laos scatters thousands of great stone vessels across the uplands, still not fully explained. In China, the Terracotta Army guards the tomb of the First Emperor with thousands of individually modelled soldiers, and the Leshan Giant Buddha, carved from a riverside cliff in the Tang dynasty, is the largest stone Buddha in the world.
India brings the Taj Mahal, the white marble tomb Shah Jahan built for his wife Mumtaz Mahal, and the Qutb complex in Delhi, with its fluted brick minaret and an iron pillar that has resisted rust for centuries. The great squares of Central Asia and Iran were made for trade and ceremony: Samarkand's Registan is framed by three tiled madrasas, and Isfahan's Naqsh-e Jahan Square by mosques and a palace of Shah Abbas I. Baku's Maiden Tower rises over the old walled city, Moscow's Red Square and St Petersburg's Palace Square stage imperial history, and the Hiroshima Peace Memorial stands as the ruin left by the first atomic bomb used in war.
In this list
| # | Place | Type | Country | UNESCO |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Hiroshima Peace Memorial | War memorial | Japan | ✓ |
| 2 | Terracotta Army | Archaeological site | People's Republic of China | ✓ |
| 3 | Qutb complex | Archaeological site | India | ✓ |
| 4 | Taj Mahal | Mausoleum | India | ✓ |
| 5 | Göbekli Tepe | Archaeological site | Turkey | ✓ |
| 6 | Red Square | Square | Russia | ✓ |
| 7 | Naqsh-e Jahan Square | Square | Iran | ✓ |
| 8 | Registan | Square | Uzbekistan | ✓ |
| 9 | Plain of Jars | Megalith | Laos | ✓ |
| 10 | Palace Square | Square | Russia | ✓ |
| 11 | Maiden Tower | Monument | Azerbaijan | ✓ |
| 12 | Leshan Giant Buddha | Sculpture | People's Republic of China | ✓ |
| 13 | Bingling Temple | Archaeological site | People's Republic of China | ✓ |
01 Hiroshima Peace Memorial
Japan · 1.3 km from Hiroshima34.396° N 132.454° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
DXR · CC BY-SA 4.0 The building now known across the world as the Atomic Bomb Dome was completed in April 1915 as an exhibition hall for the products of Hiroshima Prefecture. Its designer, the Czech architect Jan Letzel, gave it a distinctive dome that made it a landmark on the riverbank next to the Aioi Bridge.
Did you know? The bomb's aiming point was the T-shaped Aioi Bridge nearby, but it missed by about 240 metres and burst above Shima Hospital.
02 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 The farmer who found the Terracotta Army wasn't looking for it. In March 1974, Yang Zhifa, his five brothers and a neighbor were digging a well during a drought, hoping only for water, when at about three metres down they hit a layer of charcoal and reddened soil, and past four metres one of them pulled up a life-sized pottery head.
Did you know? The paint on the figures is so fragile that, once exposed to Xi'an's dry air, its lacquer base can curl within seconds and flake off in minutes.
03 Qutb complex
India · 8.5 km from New Delhi28.524° N 77.185° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by SuanlianTangpua from Pixabay The Qutb complex in Mehrauli, in the south of Delhi, is where the architecture of the Delhi Sultanate begins.
Did you know? Phosphorus-rich iron lets a protective film form on the iron pillar, and in some 1,600 years that film has grown only about a twentieth of a millimetre thick.
04 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? Its four minarets, each over 40 metres tall, lean slightly outward so that if one ever collapsed it would fall away from the tomb.
05 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 Göbekli Tepe changes the order in which the story of civilisation is usually told. On a limestone ridge north-east of Şanlıurfa, a mound about 15 metres high and 8 hectares across holds monumental enclosures built between roughly 9500 and 8000 BC — by people who had not yet adopted pottery and were only on the threshold of farming.
Did you know? In Turkish the name means Potbelly Hill, while one Kurdish name for the mound translates as Wish Hill.
06 Red Square
Russia · 0.4 km from Moscow55.754° N 37.620° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by joneybrain from Pixabay Red Square is a long rectangle — about 330 metres from end to end — laid along the eastern wall of the Moscow Kremlin, where the fortress had no river to protect it. That weakness is the square's origin: in the 1490s Ivan III ordered the ground outside the wall cleared of buildings to open a field of fire, and a deep moat was dug in front of the wall in the early sixteenth century.
Did you know? The square covers about 73,000 square metres, some 330 metres long and roughly 70 metres wide.
07 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 Naqsh-e Jahan Square — "Image of the World" — is the great public room of Isfahan, a rectangle roughly 560 metres long and 160 metres wide laid out between 1598 and 1629 when Shah Abbas I moved the Safavid capital here.
Did you know? It was inscribed by UNESCO in 1979, among the very first World Heritage Sites in Iran.
08 Registan
Uzbekistan · 3.1 km from Samarkand39.655° N 66.976° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Bernard Gagnon · CC0 Three tiled façades stand on three sides of an open rectangle, each one dominated by a towering portal and flanked by minarets, and the effect is less of a square than of a stage set built at the scale of a city.
Did you know? A Kufic inscription on Ulugh Beg's portal boasts that it is twice as high as the sky and heavy enough to slow the Earth's spin.
09 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 Plain of Jars is scattered across the Xiangkhoang Plateau in northern Laos: thousands of great stone vessels standing on hillsides and ridges, in clusters from a single jar to several hundred. They are between one and three metres tall, cylindrical, wider at the base than at the mouth, and hewn from sandstone, granite, conglomerate, limestone or breccia.
Did you know? The heaviest of the stone jars are estimated to weigh up to about 14 tonnes, yet they were moved from quarries kilometres away.
10 Palace Square
Russia · 0.2 km from Saint Petersburg59.939° N 30.315° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
W. Bulach · CC BY-SA 4.0 Palace Square is where St Petersburg performed its role as imperial capital, and later where that empire came apart. The square takes its name from the Winter Palace, the Baroque residence of the tsars rebuilt between 1754 and 1762 in white and turquoise, which fills its northern side.
Did you know? In 1924 the Soviet government decreed that the angel on the Alexander Column be replaced with a statue of Lenin; after a year of debate the idea was dropped.
11 Maiden Tower
Azerbaijan · 4 km from Baku40.366° N 49.837° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by Maxxja from Pixabay Baku, Azerbaijan's capital on the Caspian Sea, keeps its medieval heart inside the walls of the Old City, Icherisheher, and the Maiden Tower is its emblem. 5 m at the base. It has eight floors, each covered by a shallow stone vault with a central opening, and a staircase runs up inside the thickness of the walls, which are about 5 m thick at the bottom. A massive buttress projects from the tower toward the east.
Did you know? After damage in the 2000 earthquake, the Old City with the tower was on UNESCO's List of World Heritage in Danger from 2004 to 2009.
12 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 Leshan Giant Buddha is carved directly into a sandstone cliff at the point where the Min, Dadu and Qingyi rivers meet below the city of Leshan in southern Sichuan. At 71 metres high it is the tallest stone Buddha in the world and by far the largest pre-modern statue anywhere. It depicts Maitreya, the Buddha of the future, seated with hands resting on his knees and gazing across the water towards Mount Emei.
Did you know? The statue was declared a protected cultural relic in 1956, four decades before UNESCO listed it.
13 Bingling Temple
People's Republic of China · 26.8 km from Linxia City35.806° N 103.044° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Thebrainchamber1 · CC BY-SA 4.0 In a side canyon of the Yellow River, where sheer cliffs rise above the water, hundreds of Buddhas look out from niches and caves cut into the cliff. The Bingling Temple grottoes stretch for about 200 metres along the north side of the gorge and end in a great natural recess, where wooden stairways climb the rock face to higher caves and to a colossal figure of the Maitreya Buddha more than 27 metres tall.
Did you know? The ink inscription of 420 CE in Cave 169 is the earliest precisely dated inscription known from any cave temple in China.
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 squares, streets and monuments in Asia?
- On our list, Hiroshima Peace Memorial (Japan) ranks first, followed by Terracotta Army (People's Republic of China) and Qutb complex (India).
- Which country has the most UNESCO-listed squares, streets and monuments in Asia?
- In our collection, the most come from the People's Republic of China (3), India (2) and Russia (2).
- Why did the Hiroshima Peace Memorial survive the atomic bomb?
- The bomb exploded almost directly above the building on 6 August 1945, so the blast came from above rather than from the side, and parts of its walls and the steel frame of the dome stayed standing. It was kept as a ruin and inscribed as a World Heritage Site in 1996.
- How was the Terracotta Army discovered?
- In 1974 farmers digging a well near Xi'an broke into a pit full of fragments of clay figures. Excavations revealed thousands of life-size soldiers, horses and chariots buried near the tomb of Qin Shi Huang, the first emperor of China.
- How old is Göbekli Tepe?
- Its oldest monumental enclosures date to around 9500 BC, roughly 11,000 years ago. That makes it thousands of years older than Stonehenge and the Egyptian pyramids, and older than pottery and farming in the region.
- How many UNESCO-listed squares, streets and monuments are on this list in Asia?
- The list covers 13 UNESCO-listed squares, streets and monuments in 9 countries. The People's Republic of China has the most, with 3.