Asia is the largest continent on Earth and the most crowded: 49 countries and around 4.8 billion people, which is roughly 60% of everyone alive. It has the highest mountain, the lowest dry land, the biggest country, the two biggest populations, and both the wettest and some of the driest places on the planet. Almost every superlative in geography belongs to Asia somewhere.
How Big Is Asia?
Asia covers about 44.6 million square kilometres, which is around 30% of all the land on Earth. Africa, the next biggest, is about two-thirds its size.
It stretches from Turkey in the west to the eastern tip of Russia, and from Arctic Siberia down to the tropical islands of Indonesia. That is eleven time zones wide. When the sun is rising in eastern Russia, it is still the middle of the previous evening in Istanbul.
Russia is the largest country in the world and most of it is in Asia, though most Russians live in the European part. China and India are third and seventh largest by area and first and second by population.
The Roof of the World
Mount Everest, on the border between Nepal and China, is the highest point on Earth at 8,849 metres. It is part of the Himalayas, which contain all fourteen of the world's mountains above 8,000 metres.
Those mountains exist because India is crashing into Asia. About 50 million years ago India was a separate island drifting north; it collided with Asia and is still pushing, which is why the Himalayas are still growing by roughly half a centimetre a year.
The Tibetan Plateau just north of them is called the roof of the world. It is about 4,500 metres above sea level on average and roughly the size of Western Europe.
And the Lowest Point on Land
The shore of the Dead Sea, between Israel and Jordan, is about 430 metres below sea level — the lowest dry land anywhere.
The water is nearly ten times saltier than the ocean, so salty that nothing can live in it, which is where the name comes from. People float on the surface without trying, and photographs of tourists reading newspapers while lying on the water are entirely genuine.
It is shrinking. So much water is taken from the Jordan River before it arrives that the sea level drops by around a metre a year.
Where Everyone Lives
Draw a circle roughly 4,000 kilometres across, centred on the South China Sea. It would take in China, India, Japan, Indonesia, Bangladesh, the Philippines, Vietnam and more. More people live inside that circle than outside it in the entire rest of the world.
The circle is a real thing that a data analyst drew in 2013, and it has been checked and confirmed. It contains over half of humanity in about 6% of the Earth's surface.
Tokyo is the largest metropolitan area on Earth, with around 37 million people. Delhi, Shanghai, Dhaka, Mumbai, Beijing, Osaka and Karachi are all in the top fifteen.
Monsoons
Much of southern and eastern Asia depends on the monsoon, a seasonal wind that reverses direction twice a year.
In summer, land heats up faster than sea, warm air rises over the continent, and moist air rushes in from the ocean to replace it. That air dumps enormous quantities of rain. In winter the pattern reverses and dry air flows outwards.
Mawsynram and Cherrapunji in north-east India are among the wettest inhabited places on Earth, with around 11,000 millimetres of rain a year — about eleven metres. Villagers there build bridges by training the roots of living rubber fig trees across streams, because wooden ones rot in the damp.
Deserts Too
Asia also has the Gobi, spanning Mongolia and northern China, which is a cold desert where winter temperatures drop to minus 40. Dinosaur eggs were first discovered as fossils there in 1923.
The Arabian Desert covers most of the Arabian Peninsula and includes the Rub' al Khali, the Empty Quarter — the largest continuous sand desert in the world, with dunes up to 250 metres tall.
The Taklamakan in western China has a name usually translated as something close to "you go in and you do not come out". Travellers on the Silk Road went around it rather than through it.
Build the Himalayas on Your Table
Take two sheets of thick paper or two towels and lay them flat on a table so they overlap slightly in the middle. Now push them slowly towards each other.
The middle buckles upward into folds. That is exactly what happened when India hit Asia, and those folds are the Himalayas. Push harder and the folds get taller — India is still pushing.
For a second experiment, put a sponge in a bowl of water and squeeze it. That is roughly what happens under a mountain range as the crust thickens and the whole area rises. Marine fossils have been found near the summit of Everest, because that rock was once a seabed.
Two Countries With Over a Billion People
India passed China as the most populous country in the world in 2023. Both have over 1.4 billion people.
To picture that: if you stood every Indian person in a line and started counting at one per second, you would be counting for over 44 years. India also has 22 official languages and hundreds more spoken ones.
China has one written language shared across the country and many spoken varieties that are not mutually understandable. Someone from Beijing and someone from Guangzhou may not be able to talk to each other in their home languages but can read the same newspaper.
Inventions From Asia
Paper, printing, gunpowder and the compass are all Chinese inventions, and they are known there as the Four Great Inventions.
The number system you use every day — 0 to 9 — came from India, travelled through the Arab world, and reached Europe in the Middle Ages. That is why they are called Arabic numerals even though they are Indian. The concept of zero as a number in its own right was worked out in India too.
Silk, tea, noodles, the crossbow, the seismometer, the abacus and paper money all came from Asia as well. The Silk Road carried them west for roughly 1,500 years.
The Silk Road
For around 1,500 years, a network of trade routes ran from China across Central Asia to the Mediterranean. It was not one road but many, and the name Silk Road was invented by a German geographer in 1877, long after it stopped being used.
Silk went west, and horses, glass, gold and wool came east. Ideas travelled too: Buddhism spread from India into China along it, and so did paper-making, which reached the Islamic world in the eighth century and Europe several hundred years later.
So did disease. The Black Death that killed a large share of Europe's population in the 1340s is thought to have travelled along the same routes. Cities like Samarkand, Bukhara and Kashgar grew rich as stopping points, and their old centres still stand.
Rice Feeds the Continent
Around 90% of the world's rice is grown and eaten in Asia. It has been farmed in China for at least 8,000 years, and the way it is grown has shaped whole landscapes.
Rice paddies are flooded fields, and on hillsides farmers cut terraces — flat steps into the slope — to hold the water. The rice terraces of the Philippine Cordilleras have been maintained by hand for around 2,000 years and are a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Laid end to end, the walls would supposedly stretch half way around the world.
Wheat matters too, in northern China, India and Central Asia, which is why the food changes as you travel. Southern China eats rice, northern China eats noodles and dumplings, and both are made from what grows locally.
Asia's Great Rivers
The Yangtze in China is the longest river in Asia at about 6,300 kilometres and the third longest in the world. The Yellow River is shorter and carries so much fine yellow silt that it colours the sea where it arrives.
The Ganges, Indus, Mekong, Brahmaputra and Irrawaddy all start in or near the Himalayas and the Tibetan Plateau, which is why that plateau is sometimes called the Third Pole or the water tower of Asia. Around two billion people depend on rivers that begin there.
The Mekong runs through six countries and supports the largest inland fishery in the world. In Cambodia the Tonle Sap river actually reverses direction twice a year — during the monsoon the Mekong pushes so much water upstream that the lake it feeds swells to several times its dry-season size.
Islands, Volcanoes and Earthquakes
Indonesia is made of more than 17,000 islands, and the Philippines of over 7,600. Japan has nearly 7,000, though most are tiny.
All three sit on the Pacific Ring of Fire, a horseshoe-shaped zone around the Pacific Ocean where tectonic plates meet. About 90% of the world's earthquakes and most of its active volcanoes are on it.
Japan alone records around 1,500 earthquakes a year that people can feel. Its buildings are engineered for it: skyscrapers sway on purpose, and some sit on rubber and steel pads that let the ground move underneath them.
Indonesia has more active volcanoes than any country. In 1883 one of them, Krakatoa, exploded so loudly that the sound was heard 4,800 kilometres away in Australia — the loudest noise in recorded history. To keep exploring, see the full list of countries in Asia and find out about how volcanoes work.
