The biggest continent's biggest countries
Asia has around forty-eight countries and about six out of every ten people on Earth. In 2023 INDIA overtook CHINA as the country with the most people, each with over 1.4 billion. China is so wide that it would naturally cover five time zones, but the whole country runs on Beijing time, so in the far west the sun can rise at ten o'clock in the morning. MONGOLIA, by contrast, is the least crowded country in the world, with huge grasslands and many people still living in round felt tents called gers.
Countries made of islands
INDONESIA is made of around seventeen thousand islands, strung across more than five thousand kilometres of ocean, and people there speak over seven hundred languages. JAPAN recounted its islands in 2023 using modern maps and found it had more than fourteen thousand, over twice as many as it had counted before. The Philippines has more than seven thousand.
SINGAPORE is a city-state on a small island at the tip of the Malay Peninsula, one of the richest and most crowded countries on Earth. It is famous for its strict rules; selling chewing gum has been banned there since 1992, to keep the streets and trains clean.
Old names and a lake of salt
IRAN was called Persia by outsiders for centuries, and in 1935 its government asked other countries to use Iran, the name its own people had always used. MYANMAR was known as Burma until 1989. THAILAND is the only country in South-east Asia that was never colonised by a European power. LEBANON has a cedar tree on its flag, a symbol of the cedar forests that once covered its mountains and whose timber was prized by the ancient Egyptians.
The shores of the Dead Sea, between ISRAEL and JORDAN, are the lowest land on Earth, more than 430 metres below sea level. The water is so salty that nothing can live in it except tiny microbes, and people float on the surface without trying. Its level is dropping by over a metre a year as the river that feeds it is used for farming.
Countries in the grid
NEPAL holds eight of the world's ten highest mountains, and PAKISTAN has K2, the second highest, nicknamed the Savage Mountain because it is so hard to climb. BHUTAN, between India and China, is the land of the thunder dragon. BANGLADESH is one of the most crowded countries in the world and sits on the largest river delta on Earth. The most famous temple in CAMBODIA is on our places of worship page. KOREA has been divided into two countries, North and South, since the late 1940s. VIETNAM is the second-biggest coffee grower in the world. MALAYSIA's Petronas Towers were the tallest buildings on Earth from 1998 until 2004, when TAIWAN's Taipei 101 overtook them. JAPAN sits where four of the Earth's plates meet, and it has more than a hundred active volcanoes and well over a thousand earthquakes strong enough to feel every year. LAOS, the only landlocked country in South-east Asia, completes the grid.