Discover Asia

The world's largest and most populous continent — home to ancient civilizations, some of the planet's most dramatic landscapes, and cities that range from timeless temple towns to hyper-modern megacities.

Few continents pack in this much contrast: Himalayan peaks and tropical beaches, thousand-year-old religious sites and some of the world's most advanced cities, all within a region that spans a huge range of cultures, cuisines, and languages.

Asia is the world's largest continent by both area and population, home to well over half of humanity across a region that stretches from the Mediterranean-adjacent west to the Pacific coast in the east. This site's own Asia grouping focuses on East, South, and Southeast Asia specifically — China, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, India, Nepal, Pakistan, and the Southeast Asian nations of Vietnam, Cambodia, Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia, and the Philippines — with the Middle East treated as its own separate region.

Few regions on Earth offer this much genuine contrast within reach of each other: the ancient temple cities of Cambodia and India sit within the same broad region as Tokyo and Seoul's hyper-modern skylines, and the Himalayas' highest peaks are a relatively short flight from the tropical beaches of Thailand or the Philippines.

This is also one of the most linguistically, religiously, and culturally diverse regions in the world — Buddhism, Hinduism, Islam, and various folk and ancestor-veneration traditions all remain deeply woven into daily life across different parts of the continent, giving travel here as much cultural depth as scenic variety.