The Most Beautiful Villages in Asia

18 places in 9 countries · updated 13 October 2026

1. 01 Shibam

   Yemen · 17.3 km from Seiyun15.927° N 48.627° E

   

   The town has a long past. Inscriptions mention it from the third century AD, and around 300 it became the capital of the Kingdom of Hadhramaut after the destruction of the older capital, Shabwa. The town visible today dates largely from 1533 onwards, although the city as a whole has existed for some 1,700 years. It sits on a mound more than six metres above the surrounding plain — whether this is the debris of earlier towns accumulated over centuries or a natural spur of rock has never been settled by excavation. Some of the towers exceed 30 metres in height.

   Did you know? The whole walled town fits into a rectangle of only about 250 by 350 metres.

   More about Shibam →

2. 02 Hongcun

   People's Republic of China30.004° N 117.982° E

   

   That water system is what makes Hongcun unlike any other village of its kind. A narrow channel, about a metre wide, was dug to carry stream water through the settlement, winding past the doors of the houses with many bends and turns, so that households could draw water for cooking, washing and fire-fighting at their own thresholds. It feeds the Moon Pond at the centre of the village, a half-circle of still water ringed by grey-and-white houses whose reflections double them on calm mornings, and South Lake at the southern edge, a broad bow-shaped sheet of water. Walking the lanes, you are rarely out of the sound of running water.

   Did you know? In the early fifteenth century the Wang clan hired a feng shui master to replan the village and bring the river water in, creating the layout seen today.

   More about Hongcun →

3. 03 Masuleh

   Iran37.155° N 48.990° E

   

   The village lies at about 1,050 m above sea level in Gilan Province, in a green, frequently misty valley not far inland from the southern shore of the Caspian Sea. Its houses, usually no more than two storeys high, are built of stone, timber and earth, with wooden window frames and lattice work, and many walls are rendered in a yellowish clay plaster that gives the slope its warm, uniform colour. The cool, wet climate, with heavy rain and fog especially in autumn, shaped this compact and economical way of building, and Masuleh is often cited in Iran as a model of sustainable traditional architecture.

   Did you know? Archaeologists have found pottery, animal bones and stone tools in the area dating back about 7,000 years.

   More about Masuleh →

4. 04 Shirakawa-gō

   Japan · 39.6 km from Kanazawa36.271° N 136.899° E

   

   Ogimachi keeps 59 of these houses, most of them raised between the end of the Edo period and the late Meiji era. They were never simply dwellings. The tall attics, stacked in several floors under the thatch, were given over to raising silkworms, while the ground beneath the floorboards was used to make nitre, a raw ingredient of gunpowder — two trades that let an isolated valley with little flat land earn a living. Re-thatching a roof is too big a job for one family, so it has long been done by the whole community under a system of mutual help called yui; a roof lasts roughly thirty to forty years before it needs renewing.

   Did you know? Re-thatching one roof can need 200 to 300 helpers a day, and preparations, including cutting thatch from a shared field, begin at least three years ahead.

   More about Shirakawa-gō →

5. 05 Khinalig

   Azerbaijan · 32.2 km from Qabala41.179° N 48.126° E

   

   Its people speak Khinalug, which they call Ketsh mits: a language spoken nowhere else, an isolate within the Northeast Caucasian family, alongside the Azerbaijani most residents also use. The settlement traces its roots to the era of Caucasian Albania and was fortified in the tenth century. About ten mosques survive in and around it; the Pir Jomard mosque is traditionally dated to the late tenth or twelfth century, the larger Abu Muslim mosque to the eleventh, and the small Sheikh Shalbuz mosque to the sixteenth. Inside the old houses, a central wooden column holds up the roof and there is no furniture as such: rooms are furnished with carpets, blankets, pillows and long bolster cushions.

   Did you know? Soviet linguists set up a research branch in the village itself and devised a Latin-based alphabet of some seventy-two letters for the Khinalug language.

   More about Khinalig →

6. 06 Hahoe Folk Village

   South Korea · 18.6 km from Andong36.538° N 128.521° E

   

   The Pungsan Ryu clan settled here in the fifteenth century, early in the Joseon dynasty, and Hahoe has remained a single-clan village ever since. Its best-known son is Ryu Seong-ryong (1542–1607), the scholar-official of the Hahoe Ryu clan who became chief state councillor in 1592 and directed the kingdom's defence during the Japanese invasions; Okyeonjeongsa, the study he built for a quiet life of reflection, still stands in the village, and Byeongsan Seowon, the Confucian academy where he is enshrined, lies about four kilometres away.

   Did you know? Twelve masks were originally needed for the Hahoe drama; three have been lost, and the nine that survive, including the bride, the monk and the aristocrat, are protected as treasures.

   More about Hahoe Folk Village →

7. 07 Kandovan (Osku)

   Iran · 32.9 km from Tabriz37.795° N 46.249° E

   

   Look at the village from across the stream and it reads like a honeycomb set on end. Doors and small windows are cut into the soft stone at several levels, wooden frames and painted shutters sit flush with the rock, and the karaan are laid out along an east–west line with their entrances turned to the south, towards the sun. Paths and stairways climb between them, and in places a conventional house front has been grafted onto a cone, so that masonry and living rock meet in a single wall. The soft, porous material that made the digging possible is also what gives every surface its rounded, weathered look.

   Did you know? The cones were carved from non-welded ignimbrite, a grey, acidic ash-flow deposit full of pumice that is soft enough to dig by hand.

   More about Kandovan (Osku) →

8. 08 Jiufen

   Taiwan · 11.4 km from Keelung25.107° N 121.843° E

   

   The name means "nine portions". According to the usual explanation, in the early Qing period the isolated village held only nine families, who asked for nine shares of every delivery brought up from town. Its fortunes changed with gold. In 1890 workers building the railway between Taipei and Keelung came across flakes of gold, and in 1893 a rich placer field was discovered in the hills around the village, producing kilograms of gold a day. The rush turned the hamlet into a town, and it reached its height during the Japanese period, when Japanese companies mined gold-bearing quartz here; many of the old inns and houses date from that era.

   Did you know? Shuqi Road, the stepped lane that cuts straight down through the town, climbs more than 300 stone steps.

   More about Jiufen →

9. 09 Thee Ain

   Saudi Arabia19.931° N 41.443° E

   

   The settlement is around four hundred years old, its origins placed at the end of the 10th century of the Islamic calendar, roughly the late 16th or early 17th century. Several dozen multi-storey houses and a small mosque by the stream make up the old core, with forts nearby that once guarded it against raids. The builders used local stone laid course upon course, finished with mud, and bound the structure with timber beams that carry the floors; walls are around 70 to 90 centimetres thick, some houses reach four storeys, and in the larger rooms columns support the ceilings. The pale stone reflects the sun and helps keep the interiors cool.

   Did you know? The outer walls use a pale, quartz-covered stone, while the inner walls are built of hard granite quarried from the surrounding mountains.

   More about Thee Ain →

10. 10 Wae Rebo

    Indonesia · 26.8 km from Ruteng8.769° S 120.284° E

    

    Each mbaru niang is a vertical world of five levels. The ground floor is home to the families, six per house, with eight in the main house, Niang Gendang, so that the village holds 44 households in all. Above it are lofts for food and goods, for seed, and for reserves kept against hard times, and at the very top, under the peak of the roof, a space reserved for offerings to the ancestors. Local tradition traces the community back to an ancestor named Empo Maro, who is said to have come from Sumatra; the present houses date from around 1920, when the village was re-inhabited after a period of abandonment.

    Did you know? In 2008 only four of the seven houses were still standing; a team of Jakarta architects and the villagers rebuilt the missing three in the traditional way.

    More about Wae Rebo →

11. 11 Rijal Almaa

    Saudi Arabia · 24.1 km from Abha18.212° N 42.273° E

    

    The village is held to be more than 900 years old, and its prosperity came from its position on the routes that linked Yemen with Mecca, Medina and the Levant. Inside the houses, the walls are covered with the painting tradition of the Asir region, al-qatt al-asiri: bold geometric patterns of lines, triangles and squares in red, green, yellow and white, traditionally laid on by the women of the household. The skill and richness of these paintings once showed a family's standing. In 2017 al-qatt al-asiri was inscribed by UNESCO on the list of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity.

    Did you know? Saudi Arabia placed the village on its UNESCO World Heritage tentative list in 2015 as a cultural site.

    More about Rijal Almaa →

12. 12 Ōuchi-juku

    Japan37.334° N 139.861° E

    

    The settlement became a post station around 1643 on the Aizu Nishi Kaidō, the road that linked the castle town of Aizu-Wakamatsu with Nikkō and, beyond it, Edo. It had an official inn for the domain lord and served his processions on the journey to the shogun's capital, as well as the rice convoys of Aizu; but the shogunate's restrictions on side roads and an earthquake in 1683 that blocked the highway further south diverted much traffic elsewhere, and Ōuchi settled into life as a half-farming, half-inn village.

    Did you know? Isabella Bird stayed at an inn called Minoya during her 1878 journey through northern Japan.

    More about Ōuchi-juku →

13. 13 Abyaneh

    Iran33.585° N 51.592° E

    

    The doors are one of the village's small wonders. Many are carved and inscribed with lines of poetry, and they traditionally carry two different knockers: a heavy bar for men that strikes with a deep sound, and a lighter ring for women with a softer one, so the sound itself told the household whether a man or a woman was at the door. Abyaneh is also known for its people's loyalty to their own dress, still worn by many of the roughly three hundred inhabitants. Women wear knee-length skirts, cotton stockings and long, brightly flower-patterned headscarves that fall below the waist, together with the traditional giveh shoes, while men wear black coats and wide trousers.

    Did you know? Abyaneh was registered as a national heritage site of Iran in 1975.

    More about Abyaneh →

14. 14 Tsumago-juku

    Japan35.575° N 137.595° E

    

    Tsumago lies in Nagiso, at the southern end of the Kiso District of Nagano Prefecture. It was the forty-second of the sixty-nine stations on the Nakasendō, the inland road linking Edo (Tokyo) with Kyoto, and before that a stop on the Kisoji trade route through the valley. Travellers, officials and feudal lords on their processions stayed here, and the town prospered on their custom. When railways and modern roads bypassed it, Tsumago declined. In 1968 residents began a restoration effort, and by 1971 about twenty houses had been restored; the same year the community adopted a charter pledging that no property would be sold, rented out or destroyed.

    Did you know? A survey of 1843 counted 31 inns for ordinary travellers in Tsumago and a population of 418 people.

    More about Tsumago-juku →

15. 15 Al Hajjarah

    Yemen15.068° N 43.717° E

    

    The Haraz has always mattered because it lies between Sanaa and the Tihamah coastal plain, and in the 11th century it became the stronghold of the Sulayhid dynasty. Al Hajjarah's citadel is attributed to the Sulayhids and dated to the 12th century, and its position later made it an important fortification for the Ottomans, who needed to control the roads between Sanaa and the coast. Like other fortified settlements of the region, it was built to withstand siege: the houses themselves form the defences, the narrow entrance could be shut with a heavy wooden door, and at least twenty-three cisterns, together with grain stores, kept the population supplied.

    Did you know? The Haraz has long been home to a large Ismaili Shia community, linked to the Sulayhid dynasty that rose in Yemen in 1037.

    More about Al Hajjarah →

16. 16 Haid al-Jazil

    Yemen15.166° N 48.422° E

    

    The settlement is reckoned to be about five hundred years old. Its builders followed the logic seen all along Wadi Dawan: houses went onto rock and ridges, leaving the scarce fertile ground of the valley floor for cultivation. Each house is raised from sun-dried mud bricks, with timber floors dividing the storeys, the same technique that produced the tower houses of Shibam and the other towns of the Hadhramaut. Some 45 houses make up the village.

    Did you know? The building tradition of Wadi Daw'an relies on local mud mixed with straw and palm fibre, the same materials used here for centuries.

    More about Haid al-Jazil →

17. 17 Tianluokeng Tulou Cluster

    People's Republic of China24.587° N 117.055° E

    

    The magic is in the arrangement. At the centre stands the square Buyun Lou, the oldest of the group, three storeys high with 26 rooms on each floor. Around it are set three round houses, Hechang Lou, Zhenchang Lou of 1930 and Ruiyun Lou of 1936, and one oval, Wenchang Lou, completed in 1966. Seen from the viewing point on the slope above, the four curved roofs ring the square one like dishes around a bowl, which is why the cluster is known by the nickname "four dishes and a soup". The rings of dark tiled roof and earthen walls set in the hollow of the hills make one of the great architectural views of rural China.

    Did you know? Buyun Lou is said to have been burned by bandits in 1936 and rebuilt in 1953 to its original plan.

    More about Tianluokeng Tulou Cluster →

18. 18 Ine-ura

    Japan · 25.3 km from Maizuru35.675° N 135.287° E

    

    The shape of the place explains the houses. Steep, rocky mountains close in on three sides and drop almost straight into the bay, leaving only a thin strip of flat land, and the water deepens quickly offshore. Ine Bay opens to the south, and the two small Aoshima islands at its mouth act as a natural breakwater, so the surface stays calm and the tidal range is only about half a metre. With no room on shore to beach boats or dry nets, fishermen built storehouses directly at the waterline. The earliest funaya were single-storey, thatched sheds of local pine, chestnut and water-resistant chinquapin; the main family houses stood across a narrow lane behind them.

    Did you know? For more than 300 years the Ine Festival in late July has sent decorated boats, including floating stages for sacred music and dance, across the bay.

    More about Ine-ura →