Best of · Asia
The 19 Most Beautiful Places in Asia
19 places · every one real, mapped, and worth the trip
Asia holds the greatest range of natural scenery on Earth — the highest mountains on the planet, deserts the size of nations, subtropical karst valleys, and lakes so high and clear they mirror the sky. No single continent varies more from one country to the next.
This is our editors' pick of the most beautiful natural places across Asia, from the Himalaya to the islands of Japan. It isn't a ranked countdown — beauty at this scale can't be measured — but every entry is a real, mapped place with an honest guide to reaching it and the season it looks its best. (For the tropics, see our separate Southeast Asia list.)
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Zhangjiajie (Wulingyuan) Floating pillars
Hunan Province, China
Thousands of quartzite sandstone towers rising out of the mist in Hunan, the sheer, forest-topped pillars that inspired the floating mountains of Avatar.
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Taroko Gorge Cut through marble
Taroko National Park, Hualien County, eastern Taiwan
One of very few river gorges anywhere carved entirely through marble, with walls rising as much as a kilometre above the Liwu River.
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Mount Everest Roof of the world
Mahalangur Himal, Nepal / Tibet (China) border
The highest point on Earth, best seen not from base camp but from the Himalayan viewpoints and trekking valleys of Nepal that frame its vast pyramid.
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Mount Fuji The perfect cone
Honshū, Japan
Japan's near-symmetrical volcano, at its most beautiful mirrored in the Fuji Five Lakes or floating behind cherry blossom and bullet trains.
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Guilin & the Li River Karst
Guangxi, southern China
Green limestone peaks reflected in the Li River, the classic Chinese landscape of ink paintings, best drifting downstream by bamboo raft at dawn.
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Jiuzhaigou
Sichuan Province, China
A valley of impossibly blue and green terraced lakes, waterfalls, and travertine pools beneath snow peaks on the edge of the Tibetan plateau.
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Zhangye Danxia
Gansu Province, China
Rainbow-striped sandstone hills in Gansu, banded red, orange, and gold by millions of years of mineral layering, most vivid in late afternoon light.
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Annapurna Sanctuary
Gandaki, north-central Nepal
A natural amphitheatre of Himalayan giants ringing a high glacial basin, the classic reward at the end of one of Nepal's great treks.
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Huangshan
Anhui Province, China
The Yellow Mountains of China — granite spires, wind-sculpted pines, and a sea of clouds that has drawn painters and poets for a thousand years.
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Lake Baikal
Siberia, Russia
The oldest and deepest lake on Earth, holding a fifth of the world's unfrozen fresh water, its Siberian ice glowing turquoise and shattered like glass in winter.
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Pangong Tso
Ladakh, India
A long, high-altitude lake in Ladakh that shifts through blues and greens beneath bare Himalayan ridges at 4,350 metres.
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Karakoram & Baltoro Glacier
Gilgit-Baltistan, northern Pakistan
A highway of ice winding between the greatest concentration of high peaks on Earth, including K2 — a serious trek into raw high mountains.
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The Gobi Desert
Southern Mongolia (and northern China)
A vast cold desert of dunes, canyons, and dinosaur beds stretching across Mongolia and northern China under enormous skies.
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Huanglong
Sichuan Province, China
A valley of terraced travertine pools in Sichuan, tiered in gold and turquoise like a staircase of natural mirrors beneath snow peaks.
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Yakushima
Kagoshima, southern Japan
A rain-soaked island of ancient, moss-draped cedar forest off southern Japan — some trees thousands of years old — that inspired the forests of Princess Mononoke.
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Sigiriya
Central Province, Sri Lanka
A sheer rock fortress rising 200 metres from the jungle of central Sri Lanka, crowned by the ruins of a fifth-century sky palace.
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Longji Rice Terraces
Longsheng County, Guangxi, China
The Dragon's Backbone — centuries-old rice terraces coiling up whole mountainsides near Guilin, flooded to mirror the sky in spring and gold at harvest.
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Jigokudani & the Snow Monkeys
Yamanouchi, Nagano Prefecture, Japan
A steaming valley in the Japanese Alps where wild snow monkeys bathe in a natural hot spring through the winter, the only place on Earth they do.
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Yuanyang Rice Terraces The flooded terraces
Yuanyang County, Honghe, Yunnan, China
Yunnan's Hani terraces falling in as many as three thousand steps, flooded through the winter months into a staircase of mirrors.
Asia rewards planning around monsoon and altitude: the Himalaya are clearest in spring and autumn, China's mountains and lakes are at their best in autumn colour, and the deserts and high lakes turn brutal in winter. Each guide notes the window that suits it.
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