Countries in Asia

There are 46 sovereign countries in Asia. This page lists 50 entries in total because it also includes Hong Kong, Macau, Taiwan and Palestine, whose status is either disputed or defined as something other than an independent state. For a school answer, 48 or 49 is the figure most textbooks give, depending on how they treat Russia and Turkey, which straddle two continents.

China, at 9,706,961 km², if you file Russia under Europe as this site does. Russia's total territory is larger and most of it lies east of the Urals, so an atlas that counts Russia as Asian would put it first. India is second in Asia and Kazakhstan third.

India, with 1.45 billion people. It overtook China during 2023 and the gap has been widening since, because China's population is now falling while India's is still growing. Together the two of them account for roughly a third of everyone on Earth.

12: Afghanistan, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Bhutan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Laos, Mongolia, Nepal, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan. Kazakhstan is the largest landlocked country in the world, and Uzbekistan is one of only two doubly landlocked countries anywhere, meaning you must cross at least two borders from it to reach an ocean.

By area the smallest sovereign state is the Maldives at 300 km², though that land is scattered across roughly 1,200 coral islands in the Indian Ocean. The smallest entry of any kind on this page is Macau at 30 km², which is one of the most densely populated places on the planet. By population, Brunei is the smallest sovereign Asian state at 462,721.

Because its states are unusually large and unusually old. Much of Asia was governed as large empires — Chinese, Mughal, Persian, Ottoman, Russian — and when those broke up they mostly produced a small number of very big successor states rather than dozens of small ones. Africa and the Caribbean went the other way, and it shows: Asia averages roughly 96 million people per entry against 26 million in Africa.

This wheel is loaded only with countries from this region, so every spin lands inside it. The wheel on the main spin page draws twelve at a time from every country and territory on the site. Use the regional wheel when you are studying one part of the world and the global one when you want a genuine surprise.

They come from the same dataset that powers every country guide on this site, built on public country data and the most recent published estimates for population and land area. Population figures in particular are estimates and move constantly, so treat them as accurate to within a percent or two rather than to the last person.

Because they are real places with flags, capitals and residents, and leaving them out would hide some of the most interesting entries on the map. Every guide states plainly whether a place is a sovereign state or a territory, and the sovereign count is given separately in the statistics above so you can use whichever number you need.

Yes, and it is worth citing the date you looked them up, because population estimates change. If your project needs one authoritative source, cross-check the headline numbers against the UN World Population Prospects or the country's own statistics office. The rankings here — largest, smallest, most populous — are stable and safe to quote.