The Most Remarkable UNESCO-Listed Archaeological Sites in Asia

51 places in 19 countries · updated 14 October 2026

1. 01 Baalbek

   Lebanon · 33 km from Zahlé34.006° N 36.209° E

   • UNESCO World Heritage

   

   Nowhere else did Rome build on quite this scale. On a hill in Lebanon's Beqaa Valley, where the city of Heliopolis once worshipped a local storm god under the name of Jupiter, the imperial architects raised a sanctuary on a platform whose retaining walls are made of single stones.

   Did you know? In 2014 archaeologists found a block beside the Stone of the Pregnant Woman measuring about 19.6 by 6 by 5.5 metres and weighing an estimated 1,650 tonnes.

   More about Baalbek →

2. 02 Angkor Wat

   Cambodia · 5.4 km from Siem Reap13.412° N 103.867° E

   • UNESCO World Heritage

   

   Angkor Wat is the largest religious monument on Earth and the one building every Cambodian knows. It appears on the national flag. King Suryavarman II commissioned it in the first half of the 12th century as the state temple of his capital, Yaśodharapura, and dedicated it to Vishnu. It was most likely also intended as his mausoleum.

   Did you know? The temple was built from an estimated five to ten million sandstone blocks, the heaviest weighing about 1.5 tonnes.

   More about Angkor Wat →

3. 03 Somapura Mahavihara

   Bangladesh25.031° N 88.977° E

   • UNESCO World Heritage

   

   Somapura Mahavihara, at Paharpur in northwestern Bangladesh, is the ruin of one of the largest Buddhist monasteries ever built south of the Himalayas. Seals found during excavation name it as a foundation of the Pala king Dharmapala, who ruled Bengal around the late eighth and early ninth centuries, though Tibetan sources credit his successor Devapala.

   Did you know? Tibetan sources count Somapura among the five great monastic universities of Pala-era eastern India, and by area it was the largest of them.

   More about Somapura Mahavihara →

4. 04 Hampi

   India · 11.1 km from Hospet15.335° N 76.462° E

   • UNESCO World Heritage

   

   Hampi is what remains of Vijayanagara, capital of the last great Hindu empire of South India. From 1336 until 1565 the city spread along the Tungabhadra River, and by around 1500 it may have been the second-largest city in the world after Beijing, drawing merchants from Persia and Portuguese Goa. In 1565 a coalition of Deccan sultanates defeated the empire's army, and the city was sacked and abandoned.

   Did you know? In 1442 the Persian envoy Abdul Razzaq described the city as enclosed by seven rings of fortifications, the inner ones packed with shops and bazaars.

   More about Hampi →

5. 05 Palmyra

   Syria · 1.2 km from Tadmur34.550° N 38.270° E

   • UNESCO World Heritage

   

   Palmyra was a caravan city in an oasis of the Syrian Desert, about 215 km northeast of Damascus, and for three centuries it was one of the richest places in the Roman East. Its merchants ran trade routes between the Mediterranean and Mesopotamia and set up trading colonies along the Silk Road, and their wealth paid for a city whose architecture mixed Greek and Roman forms with local Semitic traditions.

   Did you know? Palmyra's tax law of AD 137, carved in Greek and Palmyrene on a 5 m slab, went to the Russian tsar in 1901 and is now in the Hermitage.

   More about Palmyra →

6. 06 Prambanan Temple

   Indonesia · 13.2 km from Yogyakarta City7.752° S 110.491° E

   • UNESCO World Heritage

   

   Local legend explains Prambanan's scale with a story dark enough that it kept people away for centuries: Prince Bandung Bondowoso wanted to marry Princess Roro Jonggrang, who agreed only if he could build a thousand temples in a single night. With the help of spirits he very nearly managed it — so she had the villagers light fires and pound rice to fake the approach of dawn, tricking the spirits into stopping short.

   Did you know? An inscription dated 856 records that the builders diverted a river, now the Opak, away from the main shrine and levelled its old bed to make room for more temples.

   More about Prambanan Temple →

7. 07 Petra

   Jordan · 32.1 km from Ma'an30.329° N 35.442° E

   • UNESCO World Heritage

   

   For centuries Petra existed mainly in local Bedouin knowledge and old texts, unseen by European travelers, until the Swiss explorer Johann Ludwig Burckhardt talked his way in in 1812 by posing as a Muslim pilgrim — the disguise mattered because outsiders weren't otherwise let anywhere near the site.

   Did you know? The Monastery, Ad Deir, is the largest monument at Petra, about 45 metres tall and 50 metres wide.

   More about Petra →

8. 08 Terracotta Army

   People's Republic of China · 24.5 km from Weinan34.385° N 109.273° E

   • UNESCO World Heritage

   

   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.

   More about Terracotta Army →

9. 09 Ephesus

   Efes

   Turkey · 21.6 km from Söke37.940° N 27.349° E

   • UNESCO World Heritage

   

   Ephesus is one of the largest Roman cities left standing in the eastern Mediterranean, and one of the few where you can walk a marble street from end to end and understand how a great ancient city worked. Founded by Ionian Greeks in the 10th century BC, it became one of the leading cities of Roman Asia, a centre of early Christianity and, until its harbour silted up, one of the busiest ports of the Aegean.

   Did you know? The Temple of Artemis took about 120 years to build and was burned down in 356 BC.

   More about Ephesus →

10. 10 Qutb complex

    India · 8.5 km from New Delhi28.524° N 77.185° E

    • UNESCO World Heritage

    

    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.

    More about Qutb complex →

11. 11 Pasargadae

    Iran30.200° N 53.179° E

    • UNESCO World Heritage

    

    Pasargadae is where the Persian Empire began to think of itself in stone. Cyrus the Great founded it in the 6th century BC, close to the field where he defeated the Median king Astyages in 550 BC, and named it after his own clan.

    More about Pasargadae →

12. 12 Zvartnots Cathedral

    Armenia · 15.9 km from Ashtarak40.160° N 44.337° E

    • UNESCO World Heritage

    

    Zvartnots was one of the boldest buildings of early medieval Christendom: a round, multi-storey cathedral raised in the 7th century just outside Vagharshapat (Etchmiadzin), the spiritual centre of the Armenian Church. It collapsed within about three centuries, but its ring of foundations, column bases and sculpted capitals is one of the most evocative ruins in Armenia.

    Did you know? The name comes from a medieval account of the 'heavenly watchers', angels said to have appeared to Gregory the Illuminator at this spot.

    More about Zvartnots Cathedral →

13. 13 Persepolis

    Iran · 16.2 km from Marvdasht29.935° N 52.890° E

    • UNESCO World Heritage

    

    Persepolis, known in Persian as Takht-e Jamshid, the Throne of Jamshid, was the ceremonial capital of the Achaemenid Persian Empire. Darius I began it around 515 BC on a vast terrace of grey limestone, looking out over the plain of Marvdasht in Fars. Xerxes I and Artaxerxes I extended it, and building went on until the empire fell.

    Did you know? Plutarch claimed Alexander needed some 20,000 mules and 5,000 camels to carry away the treasure of Persepolis.

    More about Persepolis →

14. 14 Mỹ Sơn Sanctuary

    Vietnam · 35.5 km from Da Nang15.763° N 108.124° E

    • UNESCO World Heritage

    

    In a green valley about two kilometres across, ringed by two ranges of hills in central Vietnam, stand the ruined red-brick towers of Mỹ Sơn, the great religious centre of the kingdom of Champa. For roughly a thousand years, from the 4th to the 13th century, Cham kings built and rebuilt temples here, most of them dedicated to Shiva.

    Did you know? About 32 inscribed steles have been found at Mỹ Sơn, written in Sanskrit and Cham between the 5th and 12th centuries.

    More about Mỹ Sơn Sanctuary →

15. 15 Mogao Caves

    People's Republic of China · 16.9 km from Dunhuang40.037° N 94.804° E

    • UNESCO World Heritage

    

    The Mogao Caves are among the richest treasure houses of Buddhist art anywhere. For roughly a thousand years, from the fourth century to the fourteenth, monks, merchants and officials cut shrines into a cliff face on the edge of the desert near Dunhuang, an oasis town on the Silk Road where traders and pilgrims prepared for, or recovered from, the crossing of the Gobi and Taklamakan.

    Did you know? Aurel Stein left in 1907 with about 7,000 complete manuscripts and 6,000 fragments, paying only about £130.

    More about Mogao Caves →

16. 16 Borobudur Temple

    Indonesia · 15.5 km from Magelang7.608° S 110.204° E

    • UNESCO World Heritage

    

    Borobudur was assembled from an estimated two million stone blocks without any mortar — the blocks are cut and interlocked so precisely that the structure holds together on fit alone, carrying 2,672 relief panels and 504 Buddha statues up a stepped pyramid nine centuries before anyone had a name for engineering tolerances.

    Did you know? In 1885 engineers found that the base hides an older foot carved with 160 reliefs on karma, later encased behind a new stone skirt for reasons still debated.

    More about Borobudur Temple →

17. 17 Citadel of Aleppo

    Syria · 3.7 km from Aleppo36.199° N 37.163° E

    • UNESCO World Heritage

    

    The Citadel of Aleppo is a walled palace-fortress on a huge oval mound in the middle of the old city of Aleppo, in northern Syria, and one of the oldest and largest castles in the world. People have used the hill since at least the middle of the 3rd millennium BC, when a temple of the storm god Hadad stood on it.

    Did you know? Wells cut into the citadel mound reach about 125 metres below the summit, and tunnels link the interior to its forward towers.

    More about Citadel of Aleppo →

18. 18 Takht-e Soleyman

    Iran36.605° N 47.234° E

    • UNESCO World Heritage

    

    Takht-e Soleyman, the "Throne of Solomon", is a walled royal sanctuary built around a small lake that wells up from the top of a hill in the uplands of north-western Iran. The hill itself was made by the water: a mineral-rich spring has spilled over its rim for ages, laying down limestone as it flows.

    Did you know? Adur Gushnasp is the only one of the three Great Fires of Sasanian Iran whose temple building has actually been found by archaeologists.

    More about Takht-e Soleyman →

19. 19 Derinkuyu Underground City

    Derinkuyu Yeraltı Şehri

    Turkey · 27.8 km from Nevşehir38.373° N 34.735° E

    • UNESCO World Heritage
    • UNESCO natural beauty

    

    Derinkuyu is the deepest of the underground cities of Cappadocia, a warren of rooms, stairways and passages cut down through the soft volcanic tuff to a depth of around 85 metres.

    Did you know? More than 600 separate entrances to the underground city have been found since 1963, some of them hidden beneath the basements of houses in the town above.

    More about Derinkuyu Underground City →

20. 20 Mount Nemrut

    Turkey37.981° N 38.741° E

    • UNESCO World Heritage

    

    At 2,150 metres, Mount Nemrut is one of the higher summits of the eastern Taurus range, but it is famous for what a king built on top of it. In the 1st century BC Antiochus I, ruler of Commagene, a small kingdom between Anatolia and Syria on the upper Euphrates, turned the peak into his hierothesion, a sanctuary for his own cult and presumably his tomb.

    Did you know? Antiochus shows his ancestry on two rows of relief stelae: his father's line traced back to Darius I of Persia, his mother's to Alexander the Great.

    More about Mount Nemrut →

21. 21 Göbekli Tepe

    Göbeklitepe

    Turkey · 12.8 km from Şanlıurfa37.223° N 38.922° E

    • UNESCO World Heritage

    

    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.

    More about Göbekli Tepe →

22. 22 Bayon

    Cambodia · 8.3 km from Siem Reap13.441° N 103.859° E

    • UNESCO World Heritage

    

    The Bayon stands at the exact centre of Angkor Thom, the walled capital built by King Jayavarman VII at the end of the 12th and beginning of the 13th century, and it is the temple of faces. Its towers carry more than two hundred giant stone faces, smiling calmly in every direction: often read as the compassionate bodhisattva Lokeshvara, as the king himself, or as both.

    Did you know? The name Bayon dates only from 1880, when French scholar Étienne Aymonier coined it, guessing it echoed Vaijayanta, the celestial palace of the god Indra.

    More about Bayon →

23. 23 Bagan

    Myanmar · 29.5 km from Chauk21.172° N 94.860° E

    • UNESCO World Heritage

    

    On a bend of the Irrawaddy in central Myanmar, a dry plain of 104 square kilometres is studded with brick towers and gilded spires as far as the eye can see.

    Did you know? An inscription of 1112 at the Myazedi pagoda repeats the same text in Pyu, Old Mon, Old Burmese and Pali, earning it the nickname 'Rosetta Stone of Burma'.

    More about Bagan →

24. 24 Behistun inscription

    Iran · 34.8 km from Kermanshah34.390° N 47.436° E

    • UNESCO World Heritage

    

    High on a limestone cliff above the old road between Babylon and Ecbatana, Darius the Great had his own story carved in three languages. The Behistun inscription is about 15 metres high and 25 metres wide and sits roughly 100 metres above the ground, far out of reach — which is exactly why it survived.

    Did you know? Rainwater has dissolved parts of the inscribed limestone while laying down fresh mineral crusts over other lines of text.

    More about Behistun inscription →

25. 25 Rock Shelters of Bhimbetka

    India22.939° N 77.614° E

    • UNESCO World Heritage

    

    On a forested ridge at the southern edge of the Vindhya Range, weathered sandstone outcrops form hundreds of overhangs, and on the walls of roughly four hundred of them people painted for thousands of years.

    Did you know? Fossils of the ancient animal Dickinsonia reported from Bhimbetka caused excitement among geologists until closer study showed they were the decayed remains of a beehive.

    More about Rock Shelters of Bhimbetka →

26. 26 Plain of Jars

    Laos · 5.1 km from Phonsavan19.431° N 103.153° E

    • UNESCO World Heritage

    

    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.

    More about Plain of Jars →

27. 27 Sukhothai Historical Park

    Thailand · 5.2 km from Sukhothai Thani17.021° N 99.704° E

    • UNESCO World Heritage

    

    Sukhothai Historical Park preserves the ruins of the first capital of a Thai kingdom, a city that flourished in the 13th and 14th centuries and whose name is usually translated as "dawn of happiness". Its temples, set among moats, ponds and lawns in the plains of north-central Thailand, show the moment when a distinctly Thai style of art emerged from Khmer, Mon and Sri Lankan influences.

    Did you know? The Ramkhamhaeng inscription found in the park was added to UNESCO's Memory of the World Register in 2003.

    More about Sukhothai Historical Park →

28. 28 Preah Vihear Temple

    Cambodia14.391° N 104.680° E

    • UNESCO World Heritage

    

    Preah Vihear is a temple built on the edge of the world as the Khmer knew it. It stands on a promontory of the Dângrêk Mountains where the escarpment breaks off in a sheer cliff some 525 metres above the Cambodian plain, and from the last terrace the land below stretches away to the horizon — a view that makes the setting as much a part of the monument as its stones.

    Did you know? A stele inscribed around 1120 records that the royal guru Divakarapandita gave the temple a golden dancing Shiva and lined its floor with bronze plates.

    More about Preah Vihear Temple →

29. 29 Leshan Giant Buddha

    People's Republic of China · 4.4 km from Leshan29.547° N 103.769° E

    • UNESCO World Heritage

    

    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.

    More about Leshan Giant Buddha →

30. 30 Makli Necropolis

    Pakistan24.761° N 67.900° E

    • UNESCO World Heritage

    

    Across a low, dry plateau on the edge of the Indus delta, hundreds of thousands of tombs spread over some 10 square kilometres: carved sandstone cenotaphs, brick mausoleums glazed in blue and turquoise, domed pavilions on slender columns, and stone enclosures carved so densely with rosettes, calligraphy and geometric bands that from a distance they look like temples.

    Did you know? Unusually for Muslim graves, a single frieze of local ducks is the only figurative carving on Jam Nizamuddin II's tomb; every other band is geometric or calligraphic.

    More about Makli Necropolis →