Capitals of Asia

Asia covers about 30 percent of the world’s land and is home to roughly six in ten people.

The biggest continent

Asia stretches from the Mediterranean coast of Türkiye to the Pacific islands of Japan, and from the Arctic coast of Siberia to the equator in Indonesia. It holds the highest point on land, Mount Everest at 8,849 metres on the border of Nepal and China, and the lowest dry land, the shore of the Dead Sea, more than 400 metres below sea level. India and China each have more than 1.4 billion people, so together they hold more than a third of humanity.

Geographers usually split Asia into regions, and learning capitals region by region is much easier than learning one long list. East Asia includes China, Japan, Mongolia and the two Koreas. Southeast Asia runs from Myanmar to the Philippines and Indonesia. South Asia is India and its neighbours, Central Asia is the five countries whose names end in "stan" north of Afghanistan, and West Asia (often called the Middle East) runs from Iran to the Mediterranean and the Arabian Peninsula.

Large and small countries

Russia is larger than any Asian country, but this course counts it with Europe because its capital and most of its people are west of the Ural Mountains. Within Asia, China is the largest at about 9.6 million square kilometres, and Kazakhstan, at about 2.7 million, is the largest country in the world with no coast on the open ocean. At the other end, the Maldives covers only 298 square kilometres of coral islands, and Singapore and Bahrain are also small island states. These three are too small to show on the globe at this scale, so learn them here: the capital of the Maldives is Malé, the capital of Bahrain is Manama, and Singapore is a city state whose capital is Singapore itself.

Capitals that moved

Several Asian capitals are newer than the countries around them. Kazakhstan moved its capital from Almaty, its largest city, to the northern city of Akmola in 1997 and renamed it Astana, which simply means "capital" in Kazakh, the next year. In 2019 the city was renamed Nur-Sultan after the first president, and in September 2022 a constitutional amendment gave it back the name Astana. Older maps and quiz sites still show Nur-Sultan, so it is worth knowing both names.

Myanmar’s government moved from Yangon to the newly built city of Naypyidaw in 2005, and Yangon is still the country’s biggest city. Pakistan built Islamabad in the 1960s as a planned capital to replace the port of Karachi. Türkiye is counted in Asia here because most of its land lies on the Anatolian peninsula, and its capital is Ankara, not Istanbul. Ankara had been the base of the independence movement, and on 13 October 1923 it officially replaced Istanbul, the old Ottoman capital, a few weeks before the republic was declared.

East Asia has some of the oldest capitals still in use. Seoul has been the capital since 1394, when the founder of the Joseon dynasty moved his court to the city then called Hanyang (apart from a short break from 1399 to 1405). Tokyo is younger as a capital: in 1868 the city of Edo was renamed Tokyo, which means "eastern capital", and the emperor moved there from Kyoto. Beijing, whose name means "northern capital", has been China’s capital for most of the last 600 years.

Easy to mix up

A good habit is to learn each capital together with the city people tend to guess instead. If you remember "Istanbul is the big city, Ankara is the capital", the wrong answer becomes a clue to the right one. The flashcards below cover the first 40 countries of the region in alphabetical order, and the quiz mixes generated questions with these stories.