The Most Remarkable Monuments in Asia
11 places in 7 countries · updated 13 October 2026
In short: By our ranking, the most remarkable monuments in Asia are Gateway of India (India), Terracotta Army (People's Republic of China) and Qutb complex (India). The list covers 11 monuments in 7 countries. India has the most, with 3. Last updated 13 October 2026.
Asia holds the oldest monumental architecture yet discovered and some of the largest commemorative works ever made. Here the urge to mark a ruler, a faith or an event produced carved mountainsides, tombs guarded by armies of clay, towers of brick and stone, and, in the twentieth century, colossal steel sculpture. The variety comes from the depth of history: a dozen great civilisations raised monuments across the continent over more than eleven thousand years.
Göbekli Tepe in southeastern Turkey sets the starting point: its T-shaped stone pillars, carved with foxes, boars and birds, were raised in the tenth millennium BC, long before farming took hold. In Laos, the Plain of Jars is scattered with large stone jars from the Iron Age whose purpose is still debated. The Terracotta Army, buried with China's first emperor Qin Shi Huang, numbers thousands of life-size soldiers, each with an individual face, and the Leshan Giant Buddha, carved into a cliff above the meeting of three rivers 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 Mumtaz Mahal, and the Qutb complex in Delhi, whose fluted minaret rises 73 metres. In Mumbai, the basalt arch of the Gateway of India faces the harbour. The Maiden Tower is the emblem of Baku's old city, and in Mazar-i-Sharif the Blue Mosque is sheathed in turquoise tile. Worker and Kolkhoz Woman, Vera Mukhina's stainless-steel pair, first stood on the Soviet pavilion at the 1937 Paris Exposition.
In this list
| # | Place | Type | Country | UNESCO |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Gateway of India | Triumphal arch | India | |
| 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 | Worker and Kolkhoz Woman | Sculpture | Russia | |
| 7 | Plain of Jars | Megalith | Laos | ✓ |
| 8 | Maiden Tower | Monument | Azerbaijan | ✓ |
| 9 | Blue Mosque, Mazar-i-Sharif | Mosque | Afghanistan | |
| 10 | Leshan Giant Buddha | Sculpture | People's Republic of China | ✓ |
| 11 | Bingling Temple | Archaeological site | People's Republic of China | ✓ |
01 Gateway of India
India · 16.8 km from Mumbai18.922° N 72.835° E
Image by prabhdeep567 from Pixabay Architect George Wittet designed it in the Indo-Saracenic style, deliberately fusing Gothic structural bones with Hindu- and Islamic-derived surface ornament — a visual argument, intentional or not, about what British rule in India was supposed to look like. It took until 1924 to complete, using yellow basalt quarried locally and reinforced concrete, with a central dome rising 26 metres on four turrets.
Did you know? The foundation stone was laid on 31 March 1913 by the Governor of Bombay, Sir George Sydenham Clarke.
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 What makes the find keep giving up new detail is that no two soldiers are alike. Heads were sculpted separately from the mass-produced bodies, which let craftsmen vary hairstyle, facial features, ear shape and expression figure by figure across a workforce of thousands — more than 8,000 figures are believed to exist in total, of which just over 2,000 have been excavated from three pits so far, leaving an estimated 6,000 still underground.
Did you know? Besides soldiers, the pits include about 130 chariots with 520 horses and some 150 cavalry horses.
03 Qutb complex
India · 8.5 km from New Delhi28.524° N 77.185° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by SuanlianTangpua from Pixabay At its foot stands the Quwwat-ul-Islam mosque, the first mosque built in Delhi after the conquest, begun in 1193 inside the captured Rajput citadel. Its inscriptions record that it was assembled from the material of 27 Hindu and Jain temples, and many columns of its colonnades are reused temple pillars that still carry Hindu carving. In the courtyard stands the iron pillar, over 7 metres tall and weighing more than six tonnes, with a Sanskrit inscription in Brahmi script from the fourth century AD; it is believed to have been brought here from elsewhere, and its near absence of rust has made it a famous metallurgical puzzle.
Did you know? A deep dent about four metres up the iron pillar was made by a cannonball fired at close range, most likely on Nadir Shah's orders during his 1739 invasion.
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 One story that does not hold up: the popular claim that Shah Jahan had the masons' hands cut off, or the architect blinded, afterward so the design could never be copied. Historians of Mughal architecture, including Ebba Koch, have found no contemporary record supporting it — it appears to be a much later "guide's tale," and it echoes a folklore pattern that turns up around monuments in many countries whenever a building seems almost too perfect for its makers to have simply gone on to other work.
Did you know? The cenotaphs in the main hall are empty; the actual graves of Mumtaz Mahal and Shah Jahan lie in a plainer chamber below.
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 What visitors come to see are the enclosures: round and oval spaces 10 to 30 metres across, their walls set with T-shaped limestone pillars, the oldest known megaliths anywhere. In the largest, Enclosure D, the two central pillars stand about 5.5 metres tall and weigh an estimated eight to ten tonnes each. The T is not a mere support: the pillars are stylised human figures seen from the side, and some carry carved arms that bend round to hands meeting above the belly, belts and fox-pelt loincloths. Over their faces crawl and leap the animals of the Stone Age landscape — foxes, wild boars, snakes, lions and vultures — cut in low relief with a confidence that is startling for their age.
Did you know? When the site was first surveyed in 1963, an American archaeologist mistook the tops of the great pillars for grave markers.
06 Worker and Kolkhoz Woman
Russia · 8.5 km from Moscow55.828° N 37.647° E
Image by EvgeniT from Pixabay The engineering was novel. Professor Pyotr Lvov proposed chrome-nickel stainless steel rather than bronze because it would catch the light, and the 0.5 mm skin was joined to its internal frame by spot welding instead of rivets. The group was assembled in the yard of a Moscow factory in a few months over a harsh winter, cut into 65 pieces for the train to Paris and reassembled there. The billowing scarf that seems to float behind the figures needed its own supporting truss. Mukhina received one of the first Stalin Prizes for it in 1941, and from 1947 the sculpture became the emblem of the Mosfilm studio, seen at the start of its films.
Did you know? Mukhina worked out the composition on plaster models, the tallest of them just 95 centimetres high, before it was enlarged to full size.
07 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 jars are prehistoric and connected with the dead. The French archaeologist Madeleine Colani, who studied them in the 1930s, found burnt bone, teeth and glass beads inside and burials around them, and concluded that they belonged to an Iron Age funerary tradition. Later excavations have confirmed that bones were placed in and around the jars, sometimes over many generations; studies of Site 1 suggest that its jars were first set up as early as 1240–660 BC, from stone brought from a quarry about eight kilometres away. Local legend offers another answer: the giant king Khun Cheung had the jars made to brew rice wine for a victory feast.
Did you know? At Site 75, a single jar about 1.3 metres high and over 2 metres wide held the bones of at least 37 people, adults and children alike.
08 Maiden Tower
Azerbaijan · 4 km from Baku40.366° N 49.837° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by Maxxja from Pixabay No one agrees on when or why it was built. A Kufic inscription on the south wall names Masud ibn Davud, a 12th-century architect, and most of the present structure is generally dated to that century. Some historians argue that its foundations and lower storeys are far older, from the 4th to 6th centuries, pointing to differences in the stone. Others see it as a Zoroastrian fire temple, or as an astronomical tower, noting that the buttress faces the equinox sunrise and that its rows of stone projections number 30 and 31, like the days of a month.
Did you know? The Kufic inscription naming Masud ibn Davud sits about 14 metres up the south wall, and his son is credited with the Round Tower at nearby Mardakan.
09 Blue Mosque, Mazar-i-Sharif
Afghanistan · 1.4 km from Mazar-i-Sharif36.709° N 67.111° E
Françoise Foliot · CC BY-SA 4.0 Its history is one of repeated loss and return. A first shrine was raised in 1136 by the Seljuk sultan Ahmad Sanjar; the Mongols destroyed it in 1220, reportedly believing treasure lay beneath. The present sanctuary goes back to 1480–81, when the Timurid ruler Sultan Husayn Bayqara, with his minister, the poet Ali Shir Nava'i, raised the sanctuary that stands today. Later rulers added domes and decoration over the centuries, and the emir Sher Ali Khan and members of his family are buried within the complex.
Did you know? The earliest surviving written mention of Ali's burial near Balkh comes from the Andalusian traveller Abu Hamid al-Gharnati, who died in 1170.
10 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 statue was begun in the early eighth century by a monk named Hai Tong, who hoped the Buddha's presence would calm the currents that wrecked boats at the confluence. Tradition says that when funding for the work was threatened, he gouged out his own eyes to prove his sincerity. The project stalled after his death and was taken up again by his disciples with the support of regional governors; it was completed in 803, some ninety years after it started. The stone removed from the cliff was dumped into the river, and it is often said that this actually did tame the currents.
Did you know? The statue's mouth and each of its eyes are about 3.3 metres wide.
11 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 Work here began in the early 5th century under the Western Qin dynasty. Cave 169 preserves an ink inscription dated to 420 CE, the earliest dated record at the site. Carving went on for more than a thousand years, through the Northern Wei, Sui, Tang, Song, Yuan, Ming and Qing dynasties, and each period left work in its own recognisable style. In art-historical terms Bingling stands midway, both in geography and in style, between the giant Buddhas of Bamiyan in Afghanistan and the great cave temples of central China at Yungang and Longmen. Earthquakes, erosion and looting have taken their toll, yet 694 stone statues and 82 clay sculptures survive, together with wall paintings.
Did you know? Cave 169 lies about 40 metres up the cliff, and when researchers first surveyed the site in 1951 and 1952 they could only study it through binoculars.
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 remarkable monuments in Asia?
- On our list, Gateway of India (India) ranks first, followed by Terracotta Army (People's Republic of China) and Qutb complex (India).
- Which country has the most monuments in Asia?
- In our collection, the most come from India (3), the People's Republic of China (3) and Afghanistan (1).
- How old is Göbekli Tepe?
- The oldest monumental enclosures at Göbekli Tepe date to around 9500 BC, making them roughly 11,500 years old and several thousand years older than Stonehenge or the Egyptian pyramids.
- When was the Terracotta Army discovered?
- Farmers digging a well near Xi'an found fragments of the figures in 1974. Excavations since then have uncovered pits holding thousands of warriors, horses and chariots buried with Qin Shi Huang around 210 BC.
- How tall is the Leshan Giant Buddha?
- The Leshan Giant Buddha is about 71 metres tall. Carved into a red sandstone cliff between 713 and 803, it is the largest stone Buddha in the world.
- How many monuments are on this list in Asia?
- The list covers 11 monuments in 7 countries. India has the most, with 3.