Curated playlist
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 have existed. The earliest written record of it appears in three Akkadian cuneiform…
- 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 Kush, with the Kabul River running through its heart. Its center holds the oldest…
- ManamaManama, the capital of Bahrain, sits on a small peninsula jutting into the Persian Gulf, home to roughly 743,000 people as of 2025. Beneath the glass towers of its financial district lies a city that has been fought over, traded through,…
- BangkokBangkok carries a ceremonial name so long it holds a Guinness World Records entry as the world's longest place name, at 168 letters. It begins Krungthepmahanakhon Amonrattanakosin Mahintharayutthaya and continues far beyond what most…
- 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 mountain, and to the east stands Jabal Nuqum. Between them, the capital and…
- 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 Dhiyab bin Isa Al Nahyan, who found fresh water near the coast. A popular story holds…
- 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.S. military government published in an official gazette on the 10th of October…
- 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 Neo-Babylonian period. Its name is pre-Islamic and its meaning contested, but modern…
- JerusalemJerusalem sits on a plateau in the Judaean Mountains, about 60 kilometres east of the Mediterranean and 35 kilometres west of the Dead Sea. In that relatively modest stretch of highland, a city has been continuously contested, built,…
- 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. Land subsidence along the northern coast keeps raising the flood risk, and parts of the city…
- 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. Its territory is not one island but a main island, over 60 satellite islands and islets, and…
- 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, and is widely regarded as the most densely populated built-up urban area on Earth.…
- BeijingBeijing, once romanized as Peking, holds more than 22 million residents, making it the world's most populous national capital. It sits on the northern edge of the North China Plain, with mountains rising on three sides to shield the inland…
- 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 that of the entire state of California. That single statistic captures something…
- 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 himself. Another says the Tomaras coined dhili, the Prakrit word for loose, because the…
- 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 Durbar, King George V stood at Coronation Park and announced that the seat of British…