Curated category
Capital cities in Asia
- BeirutBeirut sits on a peninsula jutting westward into the Mediterranean Sea, and the name of the city has been spoken aloud for longer than most civilisations…
- KabulKabul sits at an altitude of 1,791 meters above sea level, one of the highest capital cities in the world. It is wedged into a narrow valley in the Hindu…
- ManamaManama, the capital of Bahrain, sits on a small peninsula jutting into the Persian Gulf, home to roughly 743,000 people as of 2025.
- BangkokBangkok carries a ceremonial name so long it holds a Guinness World Records entry as the world's longest place name, at 168 letters.
- SanaaSanaa sits at an elevation of 2300 metres, making it the seventh highest capital city in the world. To the west rises Jabal An-Nabi Shu'ayb, Yemen's tallest…
- Abu DhabiAbu Dhabi means "Father of Gazelle," from the Arabic "Abu" for father and "Dhabi" for gazelle. The name traces to a hunting party in 1761, led by Sheikh…
- SeoulSeoul is the only city in South Korea allowed to carry the title special metropolitan city. That status was not inherited. It was declared in a charter the U.
- BaghdadBaghdad sits on the banks of the Tigris in the heart of Iraq, a city of eight million people that has been continuously inhabited since at least the…
- JerusalemJerusalem sits on a plateau in the Judaean Mountains, about 60 kilometres east of the Mediterranean and 35 kilometres west of the Dead Sea.
- JakartaGreater Jakarta holds more than 40 million people, making it the most populous urban area in the world. Yet the ground beneath it is dropping.
- SingaporeSingapore sits about one degree of latitude north of the equator, roughly 137 kilometres of sea between it and the line that divides the globe.
- DhakaDhaka holds a distinction that few cities can claim: with an estimated population of 36.6 million, it is the second largest city by population in the world…
- BeijingBeijing, once romanized as Peking, holds more than 22 million residents, making it the world's most populous national capital.
- TokyoTokyo sits at the head of Tokyo Bay, on the central coast of Honshu, yet by 1990 the estimated value of the land beneath the Imperial Palace alone surpassed…
- DelhiDelhi loses control of nothing more often than its own name. One legend traces it to Dhillu, a king who built a city here in 50 BCE and called it after…
- New DelhiNew Delhi is the capital city of India, but for decades it did not exist at all. In December 1911, at the grand ceremonial gathering known as the Delhi…