The Most Mystical Sacred Places in Asia
14 places in 8 countries · updated 14 October 2026
In short: By our ranking, the most mystical sacred places in Asia are Fushimi Inari-taisha (Japan), Mount Kōya (Japan) and Kedarnath Temple (India). The list covers 14 sacred places in 8 countries. Japan has the most, with 4. Last updated 14 October 2026.
Some sacred places are holy because of what people built there; others feel holy before anyone builds anything. Asia is rich in the second kind. Its religions grew up close to mountains, caves and strange rocks, and many of its shrines were placed where the land itself seemed to open onto another world: a volcanic wasteland, a boulder balanced on a cliff, a grove where spirits were said to descend. Mystery here is not decoration but the reason the place was chosen.
In Kyoto, Fushimi Inari-taisha leads pilgrims up a mountain through tunnels of thousands of vermilion torii gates. Mount Osore, in the far north of Japan, is a sulphurous volcanic landscape long believed to be a gateway to the afterlife, while Sefa-utaki on Okinawa was the most sacred site of the Ryukyu Kingdom, entered through a triangular gap between two great rocks. In Myanmar, the gilded Golden Rock of Kyaiktiyo seems ready to slip off its ledge, and Taung Kalat stands on a volcanic plug crowned by a monastery, home of the spirits called nats.
India brings two pilgrimages of extreme devotion: Kedarnath, a stone temple to Shiva high in the Garhwal Himalaya, and Shatrunjaya, a Jain hill covered with hundreds of temples. Malaysia's Batu Caves open in a limestone hill guarded by a giant golden statue of Murugan. Armenia's Geghard monastery is partly hewn from the cliff, Cappadocia's Selime Cathedral is carved into a rock outcrop, and Mashhad's Imam Reza Shrine draws millions of pilgrims each year.
In this list
| # | Place | Type | Country | UNESCO |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Fushimi Inari-taisha | Shinto shrine | Japan | |
| 2 | Mount Kōya | Pilgrimage site | Japan | ✓ |
| 3 | Kedarnath Temple | Pilgrimage site | India | |
| 4 | Batu Caves | Pilgrimage site | Malaysia | |
| 5 | Geghard | Rock-cut church | Armenia | ✓ |
| 6 | Imam Reza Shrine | Pilgrimage site | Iran | |
| 7 | Mount Osore | Pilgrimage site | Japan | |
| 8 | Western Xia Imperial Tombs | Necropolis | People's Republic of China | ✓ |
| 9 | Taung Kalat | Pilgrimage site | Myanmar | |
| 10 | Shatrunjaya | Pilgrimage site | India | |
| 11 | Kyaiktiyo Pagoda | Stupa | Myanmar | |
| 12 | Sefa-utaki | Pilgrimage site | Japan | |
| 13 | Selime Cathedral | Rock-cut church | Turkey | |
| 14 | Tokalı Church | Rock-cut church | Turkey |
01 Fushimi Inari-taisha
Japan · 7.5 km from Kyoto34.967° N 135.773° E
Image by Pexels from Pixabay Fushimi Inari-taisha is best known for a single image: a path climbing a wooded hillside inside an unbroken tunnel of vermilion torii gates, glowing in the filtered light under the cedars. The gates — thousands of them along the mountain trails — are gifts.
Did you know? According to legend, the clan chief Hata no Irogu shot an arrow at a rice cake that turned into a white bird; rice sprouted where it landed on the mountain.
02 Mount Kōya
Japan · 38.3 km from Wakayama34.218° N 135.583° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Lianguanlun · CC BY 4.0 Mount Kōya is not a single peak but a high basin in the mountains of Wakayama Prefecture, a plain at about 800 metres ringed by eight summits. In the early ninth century the monk Kūkai, known after his death as Kōbō Daishi, chose this remote upland as the centre for the esoteric Shingon school he had brought back from China, and Kōyasan grew into a temple town that is still wholly given over to religion.
03 Kedarnath Temple
India30.733° N 79.067° E
Shivam Kumar 766 · CC BY-SA 4.0 Kedarnath Temple stands at about 3,583 metres in the Garhwal Himalaya, a stone shrine set against a wall of snow peaks at the head of the Mandakini valley. It is one of the twelve jyotirlingas, the most sacred shrines of Shiva, and the highest of them all, and no road reaches it: pilgrims climb on foot for some 17 kilometres from Gaurikund.
Did you know? A 12th-century text, the Kritya-kalpataru by the Gahadavala minister Bhatta Lakshmidhara, already names Kedarnath as a sacred site.
04 Batu Caves
Malaysia · 10.8 km from Kuala Lumpur3.237° N 101.684° E
Image by zibik from Pixabay Batu Caves are a set of limestone caverns inside a 325-metre tower of karst just 13 km north of Kuala Lumpur, and they are above all a place of worship. The largest cave shelters the Subramaniar Swamy temple dedicated to Murugan, reached by 272 concrete steps built in 1940 and repainted in bright colours in 2018.
Did you know? The giant Murugan statue took about 1,550 cubic metres of concrete, 350 tonnes of steel and 300 litres of gold paint imported from Thailand.
05 Geghard
Armenia · 26.6 km from Yerevan40.140° N 44.819° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by Taken from Pixabay Geghard sits at the head of the Azat gorge, where the valley closes into walls of rock, and much of the monastery is not built so much as carved. Some of its churches are hollowed entirely out of the cliff, others are half free-standing and half cut into the mountain, and the rock faces all around are pitted with monks' cells and covered with khachkars, the carved cross-stones of Armenia.
Did you know? In 923 an Arab governor named Nasr plundered the early monastery, carrying off its manuscripts and burning its buildings.
06 Imam Reza Shrine
Iran · 4.6 km from Mashhad36.288° N 59.616° E
Iahsan at English Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 3.0 The Imam Reza Shrine in Mashhad is the burial place of Ali al-Rida, the eighth Imam of Twelver Shia Islam, who died in 818 and was laid to rest in the village of Sanabad beside the tomb of the Abbasid caliph Harun al-Rashid. A dome went up over the grave, and the city of Mashhad — the name means "place of martyrdom" — grew around it.
Did you know? Shah Abbas the Great walked the whole way from Isfahan to Mashhad on foot as a pilgrim and later had the dome gilded.
07 Mount Osore
Japan41.279° N 141.120° E
Douglas P Perkins ( Douglaspperkins ( talk )) · CC BY 3.0 Mount Osore, Osorezan, "the fearsome mountain", is a volcanic caldera at the heart of the Shimokita Peninsula, the axe-shaped northern tip of Honshu in Aomori Prefecture.
Did you know? According to the temple legend, Ennin dreamed while studying in Tang China of a sacred mountain thirty days journey east, and set out to find it.
08 Western Xia Imperial Tombs
People's Republic of China · 25.1 km from Yinchuan38.435° N 105.987° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Thebrainchamber1 · CC BY-SA 4.0 At the foot of the Helan Mountains, on the dry plain west of Yinchuan, a line of great earthen mounds rises from the steppe like weathered beehives. They are the tombs of the emperors of Western Xia, a state founded by the Tangut people that ruled much of northwest China from 1038 until its destruction by Genghis Khan's Mongols in 1227.
Did you know? Chinese writers often call the site the "Pyramids of the East", a nickname earned by its tall, tapering earthen mounds rising from the plain.
09 Taung Kalat
Myanmar20.913° N 95.209° E
Image by LuisValiente from Pixabay Rising abruptly from the dry plains of central Myanmar, Taung Kalat is a sheer-sided volcanic plug — the hardened throat of an old vent from the Mount Popa volcano — standing about 225 metres above its surroundings, with a gilded Buddhist monastery balanced on its crown.
Did you know? According to legend, the flower-eating ogress Me Wunna loved Byatta, the king's flower gatherer; he was executed for it, she died of grief, and both became nats.
10 Shatrunjaya
India21.468° N 71.800° E
Image by 710beppo from Pixabay Shatrunjaya is a hill covered in temples. On the summit and ridges above the town of Palitana in Gujarat stand almost 900 Jain shrines, from tiny niches to large temples with carved spires, packed so closely that from a distance the crest looks like a city of carved stone.
Did you know? In 2014, after a hunger strike by about 200 Jain monks, Palitana became widely described as the world's first vegetarian city, with meat, fish and eggs banned from sale.
11 Kyaiktiyo Pagoda
Myanmar17.484° N 97.098° E
Image by peteranta from Pixabay Kyaiktiyo, better known as the Golden Rock, is a granite boulder perched on the very edge of a ledge near the summit of Mount Kyaiktiyo in Mon State, southern Myanmar, at about 1,100 metres above sea level. 6 metres high and some 15 metres around; it rests on a sloping rock shelf with a tiny area of contact, and about half of it overhangs a sheer drop into the valley. On top sits a small stupa about 7 metres tall.
Did you know? According to legend, the hermit who received the Buddha's hair was named Taik Tha and kept the relic tucked into the knot of his own hair.
12 Sefa-utaki
Japan · 15.8 km from Naha26.173° N 127.827° E
Ultratomio · CC BY-SA 3.0 Sēfa-utaki is a sacred grove on the Chinen Peninsula in the south of Okinawa Island, where paths lead through dense subtropical forest to worship places set against towering limestone rocks. Its innermost and most prestigious area is Sangūi, originally an open space walled by rock on three sides, where three places of worship are concentrated and from which the eye travels across the sea to Kudaka Island.
Did you know? Sēfa means highest rank, so the popular name amounts to the greatest of all utaki; its formal sacred name is Kimigatake, Nushigatake no Ibi.
13 Selime Cathedral
Selime Katedrali
Turkey38.301° N 34.259° E
Dudva · CC BY-SA 4.0 At the northern end of the Ihlara Valley a ridge of soft volcanic tuff rises above the village of Selime, and inside it is the largest rock-cut church in Cappadocia. Known as Selime Cathedral, it is the heart of a monastic complex carved straight into the cliff, with halls and chambers set on two storeys and the upper part shaped like a fortress above the valley floor.
Did you know? Some researchers argue Selime was not a monastery at all but the rock-cut mansion of a Byzantine military family of the 10th and 11th centuries.
14 Tokalı Church
Tokalı Kilise
Turkey · 10.7 km from Nevşehir38.641° N 34.845° E
Falk2 · CC BY-SA 4.0 Tokalı Kilise, the "Buckle Church", is the largest of the rock-cut churches of Göreme and, for many historians of Byzantine art, the finest. It stands a little apart from the cluster of chapels inside the Göreme Open Air Museum, just below the main entrance, and from outside it gives almost nothing away: a doorway in a tufa slope.
Did you know? The paintings of the Old Church are dated by some scholars to around 913 to 920, roughly half a century before the New Church was cut.
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 mystical sacred places in Asia?
- On our list, Fushimi Inari-taisha (Japan) ranks first, followed by Mount Kōya (Japan) and Kedarnath Temple (India).
- Which country has the most sacred places in Asia?
- In our collection, the most come from Japan (4), India (2) and Myanmar (2).
- Why are there so many torii gates at Fushimi Inari?
- Each gate is donated by a person or business, traditionally in hope of prosperity or in thanks for it, and bears the donor's name. Inari is the kami of rice and commerce, so the gates have multiplied over centuries.
- How does the Golden Rock at Kyaiktiyo stay in place?
- Geologically, the granite boulder rests on a sloping ledge and is balanced by its own weight. According to Buddhist legend, it is held in place by a hair of the Buddha enshrined in the small pagoda on its top.
- Why is Mount Osore considered a gateway to the afterlife?
- Its barren volcanic ground, sulphur vents and the still lake beside it reminded people of descriptions of hell and the river of the dead. The Bodaiji temple there has long been visited by people remembering the dead.
- How many sacred places are on this list in Asia?
- The list covers 14 sacred places in 8 countries. Japan has the most, with 4.