Curated category
Countries in Asia
- JapanJapan sits at the edge of the Pacific, a chain of 14,125 islands stretching more than 3,000 kilometers from the frigid Sea of Okhotsk to the warm East China…
- Saudi ArabiaSaudi Arabia is the only country on Earth with a coastline along both the Red Sea and the Arabian Gulf. It covers roughly 2,150,000 square kilometers, the…
- KuwaitKuwait sits at the head of the Persian Gulf, where the Tigris and Euphrates rivers have built their delta for thousands of years.
- UzbekistanUzbekistan sits at the very center of the world's largest landmass, and it touches no ocean, no sea, and no coast of any kind.
- CambodiaCambodia sits at a crossroads where ancient empire and modern catastrophe meet, a country of 17 million people whose story spans from one of the largest…
- TajikistanTajikistan sits wedged between Afghanistan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, and China, a landlocked country where more than 90% of the land is mountain.
- TurkmenistanTurkmenistan sits at the center of one of history's great crossroads. Bordered by Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Afghanistan, Iran, and the Caspian Sea, this…
- JordanJordan sits at a crossroads few countries can claim: the meeting point of Asia, Africa, and Europe, bordered by Syria, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Israel, and…
- KazakhstanKazakhstan is the largest landlocked country on Earth, a place where you can stand west of the Ural River in Europe, then travel east into Asia without…
- LaosBetween 1964 and 1973, American aircraft dropped more than 2 million tons of bombs on Laos. That is more than all the bombs dropped by American planes during…
- Georgia (country)Georgia sits at the crossroads of Eastern Europe and West Asia, a country of 3.9 million people whose language bears no relation to any other language family…
- PakistanPakistan takes its name from an acronym a student activist coined in a pamphlet. In January 1933, Choudhry Rahmat Ali published the word, first spelling it…
- MalaysiaMalaysia sits split in two, divided by the South China Sea into Peninsular Malaysia on mainland Southeast Asia and East Malaysia on the island of Borneo.
- AfghanistanAfghanistan has been called the graveyard of empires, and that nickname was not chosen lightly. Persians, Macedonians, Mongols, British, Soviets, and…
- SyriaSyria sits at the eastern end of the Mediterranean, a country whose name carries the echo of an ancient empire it was never quite part of.
- QatarQatar is a country smaller than Connecticut that holds the world's third-largest natural gas reserves, and for a stretch in the early 2010s it was ranked the…
- AzerbaijanAzerbaijan sits at a crossroads so ancient and contested that even its name carries the echoes of a Persian satrap from the age of Alexander the Great.
- IndonesiaIndonesia stretches more than 5,120 kilometres from east to west, scattered across over 17,000 islands between the Indian and Pacific oceans.
- 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.
- United Arab EmiratesThe United Arab Emirates sits at the eastern end of the Arabian Peninsula, a place where stone tools from 130,000 years ago share the same soil as the…
- IraqIraq sits at the very point where human civilization first took hold. Between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, a region the ancients called Mesopotamia, the…
- BhutanBhutan sits tucked into the Eastern Himalayas, a kingdom where 98.8% of the land is covered by mountains, making it the most mountainous country in the world.
- MongoliaMongolia is the most sparsely populated sovereign state on Earth, setting aside the partially unrecognized Western Sahara.
- NepalNepal holds eight of the world's ten highest mountains, including Mount Everest, the highest point above mean sea level on Earth.
- ChinaChina sits in East Asia, home to more than 1.4 billion people, roughly 17 percent of everyone alive. Spread across about 9.6 million square kilometers, it is…
- ThailandThailand was the only country in Southeast Asia to escape colonisation by a European power. It bent, ceded territory, and signed unequal treaties, but it…
- IsraelThe Merneptah Stele, an ancient Egyptian monument dated to the late 13th century BCE, bears the earliest known archaeological reference to Israel as a…
- PhilippinesThe Philippines spreads across roughly 7,641 islands in the western Pacific Ocean, a country with a population of over 114 million.
- IranIran sits on one of the world's oldest continuous major civilizations, and the people of present-day Iran were first unified under the Medes in the 7th…
- BangladeshBangladesh holds almost 176 million people inside just 148,460 square kilometres of land. That makes it the eighth-most populous country on Earth, and one of…
- EgyptEgypt covers the northeast corner of Africa and the southwest corner of Asia, joined by the Sinai Peninsula. Over 107 million people live there, making it…
- MyanmarMyanmar covers more land than any other country in Mainland Southeast Asia, and roughly 55 million people live inside its borders.
- RussiaRussia spans eleven time zones. No other country on Earth does. Its borders touch fourteen nations, its coastline is the world's fourth-longest at over…
- TurkeyTurkey, officially the Republic of Türkiye, is home to over 86 million people. Its capital, Ankara, sits inland on the high central plateau, while Istanbul…
- VietnamVietnam is as little as 50 kilometres across at its narrowest point, in the central Quảng Bình province, yet it widens to around 600 kilometres in the north.
- IndiaIndia, officially the Republic of India, holds a distinction that no other country on earth can claim: it is simultaneously the world's most populous nation…
- Sri LankaSri Lanka sits at the southern tip of India, separated from the subcontinent by just a narrow channel of water. It is one of the most ancient inhabited…
- MaldivesThe Maldives sits an average of just 1.5 metres above the sea that surrounds it. Its highest natural point reaches only 2.4 metres, which makes it the…