Kazakhstan is the ninth-largest country in the world and the largest landlocked country on Earth, covering about 2,724,900 km² (1,052,100 sq mi) according to the CIA World Factbook. That is roughly four times the size of Texas, about 4.2 times the size of France, around 60% larger than Alaska and more than twice the size of the other four Central Asian republics put together. Its 20.6 million people give it fewer than 8 inhabitants per km², one of the lowest densities in the world. The best way to understand that scale is to cross it: about 3,000 km from the Caspian Sea to the Altai Mountains, and about 1,600 km from the Siberian plain to the Tian Shan.
West to East: Atyrau on the Ural River to the Altai
Start in the far west, at Atyrau, the oil city at the mouth of the Ural River on the Caspian Sea. Atyrau is a transcontinental city, because the Ural is usually taken as the dividing line between Europe and Asia, and that small slice west of the river makes Kazakhstan one of only two landlocked countries with territory on two continents (Azerbaijan is the other). The city lies 2,700 km west of Almaty and just 351 km east of the Russian city of Astrakhan, which is a first clue to how stretched the country is: Atyrau is far closer to the Volga delta than to its own largest city. Our explainer on whether Kazakhstan is in Europe or Asia covers that boundary in more detail.
South of Atyrau the Caspian shore runs for 1,894 km, although the country is still counted as landlocked because the Caspian has no outlet to the ocean. On the Mangyshlak Peninsula sits the port of Aktau, and inland from it the Karagiye Depression drops to 132 m (433 ft) below sea level, the lowest point in Kazakhstan. East of the Caspian the land rises onto the Ustyurt Plateau, a dry tableland of about 200,000 km² shared with Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan, and then falls towards the remains of the Aral Sea, which split into separate basins after Soviet-era irrigation drained its feeder rivers.
Keep going east and you reach the Baikonur Cosmodrome, about 200 km east of the Aral Sea near the Syr Darya, a spaceport Russia leases until 2050. Beyond it the deserts of the south-centre, the Kyzylkum (about 298,000 km²), the Moiynkum and the Betpak-Dala (about 75,000 km²), give way to the low, worn hills of the Kazakh Uplands, known in Kazakh as Saryarqa, the "Yellow Ridge". In the south-east lies Lake Balkhash, about 16,400 km², unusual in being fresh in its western half and salty in its eastern half. The journey ends in the far east around Öskemen (Ust-Kamenogorsk), Lake Zaysan and the foothills of the Altai, on the borders of Russia and China.
Measured on a globe, Kazakhstan spans 40°45′ of longitude between its westernmost and easternmost points. At the country’s latitude that works out to roughly 3,000 km, which is why a city in the far west can sit 2,700 km from Almaty without leaving the country.
North to South: Petropavl to the Tian Shan
The north–south crossing is shorter but just as varied. Kazakhstan lies between about 40° and 56°N, a span of roughly 15 degrees of latitude, or about 1,600 km. At the northern end is Petropavl on the Ishim River, on the edge of the West Siberian Plain. It is 261 km from the Russian city of Omsk and 428 km from Astana along the A1 highway, and its climate is an extreme form of the humid continental type, with drastic swings between summer and winter.
Heading south from Petropavl, the road crosses the Kazakh Steppe, the largest dry steppe region in the world, covering about 804,450 km², or nearly 30% of the country’s area. The capital, Astana, stands on the Ishim in the middle of it, with about 1.7 million people; it took over as capital from Almaty in 1997. South of the capital the steppe turns to semi-desert around the Betpak-Dala, known in Russian as the Northern Hungry Steppe, and then to the Moiynkum sands north of the Chu River.
The southern edge is mountain country. Almaty, the largest city, sits at the foot of the Zailiysky Alatau, and Shymkent, the third-largest, lies near the Uzbek border, 1,483 km south of Astana and only 120 km north of Tashkent. About 200 km east of Almaty, the Charyn River has cut an 80 km canyon whose walls rise 150 to 300 m. Further east still, on the tripoint with Kyrgyzstan and China, is Khan Tengri, the highest point in the country. Its rock summit stands at 6,995 m (22,949 ft), and its ice cap brings it to 7,010 m, so climbers count it among the 7,000 m peaks. That gives Kazakhstan a vertical range of more than 7,100 m, from the Karagiye Depression to Khan Tengri.
From Four Time Zones to One: Kazakhstan’s Clock Since 1 March 2024
A country this wide has always had trouble agreeing on the time. The 40°45′ of longitude between its western and eastern extremes add up to a difference of 2 hours and 43 minutes in local solar time. When Soviet time zones were drawn up in 1919, the territory was split across four zones, with offsets later shifted by "decree time" to between UTC+4 and UTC+7. A reform effective on 1 March 1957 cut that to two zones, UTC+5 in the west and UTC+6 in the rest of the country.
After independence in 1991 the map changed repeatedly. Regions such as Uralsk, Kyzylorda, Mangystau and Atyrau switched offsets in the 1990s and 2000s, and daylight saving time was abolished altogether by a decree of 15 March 2005. For most of the period since then, the west ran on UTC+5 and Astana, Almaty and the east on UTC+6. A government amendment of 19 January 2024 ended that split, and since 1 March 2024 the whole of Kazakhstan has used a single time zone, UTC+5. The result is that the sun now rises noticeably earlier by the clock in Öskemen than in Atyrau, 2,700 km to the west, and both cities share the same time.
Seventeen Regions and a 7,644 km Russian Frontier
Kazakhstan’s size is also written into its administration. The country is divided into 17 regions and four cities with regional status, Astana, Almaty, Shymkent and Baikonur, that do not belong to the regions around them. Three of the regions are new: on 16 March 2022 President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev announced the creation of Abai Region from East Kazakhstan (capital Semey), Ulytau Region from Karaganda (capital Jezkazgan) and Jetisu Region from Almaty Region (capital Taldykorgan).
The CIA World Factbook puts Kazakhstan’s land boundaries at 13,364 km, about a third of the way around the equator. By far the longest stretch is with Russia, given by the Factbook as 7,644 km, although other sources measure it at about 6,846 km. Uzbekistan, China, Kyrgyzstan and Turkmenistan share the remainder, and each of those crossings is described in our Kazakhstan borders explainer.
What 2.7 Million km² Holds: Desert, Steppe and Very Few People
Within that outline, the land is mostly dry. About 44% of Kazakhstan is desert and another 14% semi-desert, while steppe grassland covers about 26% and forest only about 5.5%. Almost all of its 8,500 rivers drain into closed basins such as the Caspian, the Aral and Lake Balkhash, or simply disappear into the sand; only the Irtysh, Ishim and Tobol, flowing north into Siberia, eventually reach the Arctic Ocean. The country also counts about 48,000 lakes, many of them shallow and seasonal.
Even the water bodies on the map have changed size within living memory. The Aral Sea, which in the 1970s was larger than any of North America’s Great Lakes except Superior, had lost an estimated 60% of its volume by 1993 and broken into separate pieces, leaving the old port of Aral’sk more than 70 km from the shore. The Caspian moved the other way for a time: after its level began rising in 1978, more than 10,000 km² of land in Atyrau Region went under water. The national outline has shifted too. While part of the Russian Empire the territory lost land to China’s Xinjiang, and in the Soviet period some went to Uzbekistan’s Karakalpakstan.
Set beside more familiar places, Kazakhstan measures up like this:
- Texas (about 695,660 km²): Kazakhstan is roughly 3.9 times larger.
- France (643,801 km²): about 4.2 times the size.
- The United Kingdom (244,376 km²): it would fit inside Kazakhstan about 11 times.
- Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan combined (about 1.28 million km²): Kazakhstan is about 2.1 times larger.
- Western Australia: Kazakhstan is slightly larger, according to the Factbook’s own comparison.
On the world list Kazakhstan sits just behind Argentina (2,780,400 km²) and just ahead of Algeria (2,381,741 km²). Among the ten largest countries it is the only one with no coastline on the open ocean, which is why it heads every list of landlocked countries by a wide margin. And with about 20.6 million people spread across that area, a traveller crossing from Atyrau to Öskemen or from Petropavl to Almaty spends most of the journey in open steppe and desert, passing towns that sit hundreds of kilometres apart.