The Most Remarkable Rock Formations in Asia
19 places in 13 countries · updated 14 October 2026
In short: By our ranking, the most remarkable rock formations in Asia are Chocolate Hills (Philippines), Dasht-e Lut (Iran) and Manpupuner rock formations (Russia). The list covers 19 rock formations in 13 countries. The People's Republic of China has the most, with 5. Last updated 14 October 2026.
Few regions show such a range of rock shapes as Asia, because few span such different climates. Monsoon rain dissolves limestone into stone forests and natural bridges in southern China, desert wind sands soft sediment into long ridges in Iran and Arabia, and cooling lava has left columns in Armenia and on the coast of Hong Kong. In the cold north, frost and time have reduced whole mountains to a few resistant pillars. Many of these places also carry local legends that explain their shapes long before geology did.
The Chocolate Hills on Bohol in the Philippines are well over a thousand rounded limestone mounds whose grass turns brown in the dry season. In Iran's Dasht-e Lut, wind has carved long ridges called kaluts, and satellites have measured some of the hottest land surface temperatures on Earth there. In the Northern Urals, the Manpupuner rock formations are seven stone pillars standing alone on a plateau, and in Armenia's Garni Gorge the basalt columns known as the Symphony of Stones hang from the cliffs like organ pipes.
China contributes some of the most famous karst forms. The Shilin Stone Forest in Yunnan is a maze of grey limestone pillars tied to the legend of Ashima of the Yi people, and the Three Natural Bridges in Wulong are giant stone arches over a deep gorge. Hexagonal volcanic columns line the shore by the High Island Reservoir in Hong Kong. In Saudi Arabia, Al Naslaa is a sandstone boulder split by a strikingly straight crack, while Elephant Rock near AlUla is an arch shaped like an elephant's trunk.
In this list
| # | Place | Type | Country | UNESCO |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Chocolate Hills | Rock formation | Philippines | |
| 2 | Dasht-e Lut | Rock formation | Iran | |
| 3 | Manpupuner rock formations | Rock formation | Russia | |
| 4 | Three Natural Bridges | Natural arch | People's Republic of China | |
| 5 | Shilin Stone Forest | Rock formation | People's Republic of China | ✓ |
| 6 | Yehliu Geopark | Rock formation | Taiwan | |
| 7 | Moon Hill | Natural arch | People's Republic of China | |
| 8 | High Island Reservoir | Rock formation | People's Republic of China | |
| 9 | Al Naslaa Rock | Archaeological site | Saudi Arabia | |
| 10 | Torysh | Rock formation | Kazakhstan | |
| 11 | Elephant Rock (Jabal AlFil) | Rock formation | Saudi Arabia | |
| 12 | Princess of Hope | Rock formation | Pakistan | |
| 13 | Sam Phan Bok | Rock formation | Thailand | |
| 14 | Raouché Rocks, Beirut | Rock formation | Lebanon | |
| 15 | Ganh Da Dia | Rock formation | Vietnam | |
| 16 | Shipton's Arch | Natural arch | People's Republic of China | |
| 17 | Symphony of Stones, Garni Gorge | Rock formation | Armenia | |
| 18 | Solomon's Pillars | Rock formation | Israel | |
| 19 | Bozzhyra | Rock formation | Kazakhstan |
01 Chocolate Hills
Philippines9.917° N 124.167° E
P199 · CC BY-SA 3.0 They are a form of cone karst. The hills are made of marine limestone, rich in fossils, laid down on the sea floor a few million years ago and then raised above sea level. Rain and groundwater dissolved the rock along cracks and weak zones, leaving the more resistant parts as regular cones while the ground between them was worn down. The neatness of their shapes, and how evenly they are spaced, is what makes the place so arresting.
Did you know? Their limestone is packed with fossils of shallow-sea life — foraminifera, corals, molluscs and algae — from the Late Pliocene to Early Pleistocene.
02 Dasht-e Lut
Iran30.264° N 59.241° E
- UNESCO natural beauty
Betta27 · Public domain The great spectacle is the kaluts, the yardangs of the central Lut. Over a belt some 150 km long, the wind has carved soft sedimentary deposits into long parallel ridges separated by deep corridors, like the hulls of an immense fleet of upturned ships or the ruined walls of a city. The tallest stand many tens of metres high, and they are counted among the tallest and most continuous yardang fields in the world. In the low sun of morning and evening their flanks turn amber and rose and their shadows stretch for hundreds of metres across the floor of the corridors.
Did you know? NASA's Aqua satellite recorded a ground temperature of 70.7 °C here in 2005, while the air above may have been far cooler.
03 Manpupuner rock formations
Russia62.258° N 59.298° E
Aleksandr Chazov · CC BY-SA 4.0 Each pillar has its own shape, weathered and cracked in its own way, and their outlines change dramatically as you walk around them, which is why they have gathered so many names. Russians call them the Seven Strong Men or the Poles of the Komi Republic; in the Mansi language Manpupuner means "small idol mountain", and the Komi name translates as "idol stone". For the Mansi, the indigenous people of these mountains, the pillars were sacred, and climbing them was considered a sin. Today they count among the Seven Wonders of Russia.
Did you know? In the same legend, the frightened shaman flung away his drum, which became the neighbouring mountain Koip, whose name means drum.
04 Three Natural Bridges
People's Republic of China29.434° N 107.801° E
Brookqi · Public domain The three are named for dragons. Tianlong, the Sky Dragon, stands about 235 metres tall with some 96 metres of open air beneath it; Qinglong, the Azure Dragon, is the tallest at roughly 281 metres; Heilong, the Black Dragon, is the broadest, close to 200 metres wide, with the highest opening of the three. Beside the arches open two enormous collapse pits, Qinglong and Shenying tiankeng, each more than 270 metres deep. Together they form part of the Wulong Karst, inscribed by UNESCO in 2007 as one of the components of the South China Karst World Heritage Site.
Did you know? The rock overhead is immensely thick: roughly 150 metres above the opening of Tianlong, 168 metres above Qinglong and 107 metres above Heilong.
05 Shilin Stone Forest
People's Republic of China24.818° N 103.325° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
- UNESCO natural beauty
- UNESCO Global Geopark
CEphoto, Uwe Aranas · CC BY-SA 3.0 The protected area spreads over roughly 500 km² and is divided into several zones, which include caves, lakes and waterfalls as well as the pillar fields. The most visited part, near the main entrance, is a dense maze of peaks with smooth, fluted sides; another section holds the formation everyone comes to find — a single pillar said to be Ashima. In the story told by the Sani, a branch of the Yi people who live around Shilin, Ashima was a girl forbidden to marry the man she loved and turned to stone; local tradition still points to her silhouette among the rocks.
Did you know? The main pillar fields are carved from Permian Makou limestone, while the Naigu Stone Forest formed in dolomite and dolomitic limestone of the older Qixia Formation.
06 Yehliu Geopark
Taiwan · 9.6 km from Keelung25.214° N 121.698° E
Image by sharonang from Pixabay The cape is made of layered sandstone rich in lime, laid down in the Miocene sea and later lifted by the collision of tectonic plates that raised the mountains of northern Taiwan. Once exposed, its layers wore away at different speeds. Harder, cemented caps and nodules resisted the waves and spray while the softer rock beneath them was scoured away, leaving top-heavy pedestals perched on slender necks. The ginger rocks owe their knobbly shapes to irregular concretions, the candle rocks to round hard cores set in eroded rings, and the grid of the tofu rocks to joints in the stone widened by the sea.
Did you know? Spanish ships often ran aground on the cape, and the later Dutch also labelled it the Devil's Point on their charts.
07 Moon Hill
People's Republic of China24.728° N 110.467° E
Eric T Gunther · CC BY 3.0 The arch is a relic of a cave. Ages ago, groundwater moving through the limestone below the water table dissolved a tunnel deep inside what was then a larger rock mass. As the landscape was gradually lowered by erosion, the surrounding rock wore away and the tunnel was left high on the flank of an isolated tower, open at both ends. The same processes shaped the whole countryside around Guilin and Yangshuo, one of the world's classic tower karst landscapes, where steep-sided peaks crowd the valleys of the Li River and its tributaries and have inspired Chinese painters and poets for centuries.
Did you know? From the road below, the arch appears to change shape like the phases of the moon as you move.
08 High Island Reservoir
People's Republic of China · 18.9 km from Hong Kong22.375° N 114.351° E
Minghong · CC BY-SA 4.0 The columns record a violent episode about 140 million years ago, when a huge volcanic eruption in this area buried the landscape under thick deposits of hot ash. As that layer of welded tuff slowly cooled and contracted, it cracked into a regular honeycomb of polygonal prisms, much as drying mud splits into cells. The columns here are unusually large for acidic volcanic rock, typically more than a metre across, and in places the sequence is over a hundred metres thick. Near the dam some columns are bent into S-shaped curves, a sign that the rock was still deforming under its own weight before it fully set, and the sea has cut caves and arches into the cliffs.
Did you know? The rim of its buried caldera, about 18 kilometres across, runs over High Island and extends beneath Kowloon and Hong Kong Island.
09 Al Naslaa Rock
Saudi Arabia27.229° N 38.572° E
Disdero · CC BY-SA 4.0 The cleft follows a joint — a natural fracture plane in the rock — along which the stone has parted. Erosion has since cut back the base of each half, leaving them perched like a pair of mushrooms on slender supports. The precise way the split came to be so clean has been the subject of popular debate, but geologically it is a natural joint: the rock parted along a line of weakness already present in the stone.
Did you know? Besides a natural joint, geologists have suggested movement along a small fault or freeze-thaw cycles in a cooler, wetter past as ways the first crack could have opened.
10 Torysh
Kazakhstan44.361° N 51.561° E
Alexandr Babkin · CC BY-SA 4.0 The balls are concretions — a type of rock formation found in many parts of the world, though Torysh has some of the largest examples. They began on the floor of an ancient sea, where a small hard nucleus such as a shell fragment, grain of sand or mineral crystal attracted minerals precipitating out of the surrounding sediment, usually calcite, silicates and iron oxides. Layer by layer, a hard sphere grew around it, cemented into rock far tougher than the sediment in which it formed. Over tens of millions of years, uplift brought these layers to the surface, and erosion stripped away the softer rock around the spheres, leaving them stranded on the plain.
Did you know? They formed on the bed of the ancient Tethys Ocean, the sea that once separated the continents of the north and south.
11 Elephant Rock (Jabal AlFil)
Saudi Arabia26.689° N 37.982° E
Uhooep · CC BY-SA 4.0 The rock belongs to the thick sandstone beds that underlie this part of north-western Arabia. They were laid down roughly 540 to 485 million years ago, in the Cambrian and early Ordovician, and lifted up around 30 million years ago, when the crust was stretched and the Red Sea began to open. Since then erosion has broken the plateau into the scattered towers, arches and mushroom rocks that fill the valleys around AlUla, and Jabal AlFil, "elephant mountain" in Arabic, is the most striking of them because it stands alone on flat ground, with nothing to hide its silhouette.
Did you know? Seen in profile, the trunk reaches all the way down to the sand, leaving a gap of open sky between it and the bulk of the body.
12 Princess of Hope
Pakistan25.424° N 65.326° E
Muhammad Shoaib Ahsan · CC BY-SA 4.0 The name is recent. It was given in 2002 by the actress Angelina Jolie, who passed through the area while serving as a UN goodwill ambassador and named the rock on the spot, struck by the way it resembled a figure looking out over the land. The label stuck, and the Princess of Hope has since become one of the best-known landmarks along this stretch of the coast. Close by stands another of the region's rock sculptures, the so-called Balochistan Sphinx, also called the Lion of Balochistan, whose eroded mass recalls a crouching beast with a head and paws. Both are visible from the Buzi Pass section of the Makran Coastal Highway.
Did you know? The neighbouring Balochistan Sphinx is also known by the name Abul-Hol and is often compared with the Great Sphinx of Giza.
13 Sam Phan Bok
Thailand15.793° N 105.399° E
Charin ninsu · CC BY 3.0 The name translates roughly as "three thousand hollows" or "three thousand shallow pools", after the countless potholes scattered across the rock. They are the work of the Mekong itself. The sandstone belongs to the Phu Phan Formation of the Khorat Group, the rock series that underlies much of the Khorat Plateau of northeastern Thailand. Over millions of years, swirling currents in the rainy-season floods have spun sand and pebbles inside cracks in the rock, grinding them out into ever wider and deeper cavities, until the shelf has become a maze of more than three thousand basins and potholes. The process continues each year as the river rises and falls.
Did you know? The potholes come in many outlines, from circles and ovals to shapes that resemble stars and hearts.
14 Raouché Rocks, Beirut
Lebanon · 3.9 km from Beirut33.890° N 35.470° E
Image by Gaspartacus from Pixabay How the rocks came to stand apart from the shore is uncertain. Some geologists have suggested that they were isolated by strong earthquakes that struck the sea off western Beirut in the 13th century, but this remains a hypothesis. The origin of the name is debated too: one explanation links it to an Aramaic word meaning "head", another to the French rocher, "rock", a name that may only have come into use during the French mandate. In Arabic the formation is also called the Rock of Pigeons, and locally it has been nicknamed the Rock of Love.
Did you know? The name Pigeons' Rock recalls the pigeons that once lived in large numbers on the two sea stacks.
15 Ganh Da Dia
Vietnam · 28.1 km from Tuy Hòa13.335° N 109.298° E
Đông Hồ · CC BY-SA 2.0 The formation covers an area roughly 250 metres long and 100 metres wide. It was produced by volcanic activity millions of years ago: basalt from eruptions on the Vân Hòa Plateau flowed toward the coast and, meeting cold seawater, cooled and contracted so rapidly that it cracked into vertical polygonal columns. The waves later split many of these columns horizontally, giving them their disc-like appearance. The site is divided into two promontories — a northern one where the columns lean and curve, and a southern one where they stand mostly upright, rising in steps from the water's edge.
Did you know? The lava that formed the columns flowed from the Vân Hòa Plateau, which lies roughly 30 km inland as the crow flies.
16 Shipton's Arch
People's Republic of China39.660° N 75.524° E
LoudNotes at English Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 3.0 Then it disappeared. When Guinness staff later tried to re-verify the height, they couldn't locate the arch at all, and it dropped out of the record book as if it had never existed. It took a National Geographic-sponsored expedition in 2000 — fifty-three years after Shipton's original trip — to relocate it and confirm the thing was real all along; the surrounding gorges are disorienting enough that even a well-documented landmark can effectively go missing for half a century.
Did you know? Seen from the usual northern approach, the arch rises only about 60 metres above a rubble pile; the huge figures come from measuring to the canyon floor on the south.
17 Symphony of Stones, Garni Gorge
Armenia · 21 km from Yerevan40.116° N 44.741° E
Diego Delso · CC BY-SA 4.0 The gorge is protected as a natural monument, and the formation is especially striking because of what stands above it. On a promontory at the gorge's edge is the Temple of Garni, an Ionic colonnaded temple usually attributed to King Tiridates I of Armenia in the later 1st century AD and built of local basalt. It is regarded as the only largely preserved Greco-Roman colonnaded building in the former Soviet Union. The temple collapsed in an earthquake in 1679 and was put back together in 1969–1975 using its original stones. It stands within the ruined Garni fortress, one of the oldest in Armenia, which guarded approaches to the Ararat plain.
Did you know? In 2025 the 'Basalt Organ' columns and the Garni archaeological complex were added together to Armenia's tentative list for UNESCO World Heritage.
18 Solomon's Pillars
Israel · 29.4 km from Aqaba29.769° N 34.955° E
Avinoam Zehavi · CC BY-SA 4.0 The name is a modern one. In the 1930s the archaeologist Nelson Glueck linked the copper mines of Timna with King Solomon and called the area "King Solomon's Mines", an attribution that has not held up: radiocarbon dating of the 10th-century BCE workings points instead to the Edomites. Copper had in fact been mined in the valley since the 6th or 5th millennium BCE. Surveys led from 1959 by Beno Rothenberg recorded thousands of mines and smelting camps across the region.
Did you know? The Egyptian shrine of Hathor at the base of the pillars measured about 15 by 15 metres and was faced with white sandstone hauled from several kilometres away.
19 Bozzhyra
Kazakhstan43.408° N 54.104° E
Zoin · CC BY-SA 4.0 The rock is limestone and chalk, layers more than 250 metres thick laid down on the floor of the Tethys, the ancient ocean that covered this part of the world tens of millions of years ago. When the sea withdrew, wind and the rare rains set to work on the soft sediments and carved them into the forms seen today. The same erosion keeps exposing remains of the marine world that formed them: shells, sea urchins, belemnites, fossilised algae and even sharks' teeth weather out of the slopes. The tract as a whole is vast, around 3,000 square kilometres, but its most striking scenery is concentrated in a few dozen square kilometres around the valley.
Did you know? The highest point of the tract, the mountain that shares its name with Bozzhyra, reaches about 287 metres above sea level.
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 rock formations in Asia?
- On our list, Chocolate Hills (Philippines) ranks first, followed by Dasht-e Lut (Iran) and Manpupuner rock formations (Russia).
- Which country has the most rock formations in Asia?
- In our collection, the most come from the People's Republic of China (5), Kazakhstan (2) and Saudi Arabia (2).
- How were the Chocolate Hills formed?
- The Chocolate Hills are uplifted marine limestone that was weathered by rain and dissolution into rounded cone-shaped hills. They are covered in grass that dries and turns brown in the dry season, which gives them their name.
- What is a yardang?
- A yardang is a streamlined ridge carved by wind-blown sand from soft sediment, usually aligned with the prevailing wind. The kaluts of Iran's Dasht-e Lut are among the largest yardang fields in the world.
- What are the Manpupuner pillars made of?
- The seven Manpupuner pillars are made of hard quartzite schist, the remains of a mountain range that was worn down by frost, wind and rain over millions of years. Local Mansi legends describe them as petrified giants.
- How many rock formations are on this list in Asia?
- The list covers 19 rock formations in 13 countries. The People's Republic of China has the most, with 5.