World Heritage Sites — Asia & Middle East

World Heritage across Asia and the Middle East

From Petra to Kyoto is a long way, and this map covers all of it: the Levant and Arabia, Iran and Central Asia, the Indian subcontinent, China, Korea, Japan, and Southeast Asia — 368 sites, the most of any continent after Europe. China alone has 60, including the Great Wall, the Forbidden City, the Terracotta Army, and the Mogao Caves on the Silk Road. India has 44, Iran 28, Japan 26.

It's the continent where the list is still growing fastest. The 2026 session added Sarnath, where the Buddha first taught; the ancient capitals of Asuka and Fujiwara in Japan; the Xiongnu royal cemeteries in Mongolia; the rock mosques of Mangystau in Kazakhstan; and Wat Phra Mahathat in Thailand. The Middle East's entries carry the list's sadder history too: Palmyra, Aleppo, and the other Syrian sites are all on the List of World Heritage in Danger, and the map flags them.

Building a route

Some of the best concentrations on the planet are here. Kyoto and Nara together are 25 sites within an hour of each other. Rajasthan and the Golden Triangle put the Taj Mahal, Agra Fort, Fatehpur Sikri, Jaipur, and the Jantar Mantar within a week's loop. Uzbekistan's Silk Road cities — Samarkand, Bukhara, Khiva, Shakhrisabz — are four sites on one train line. Siberian Russia's natural sites (Baikal, Kamchatka, the Altai) are on this map rather than Europe's. Click a badge or its pin to mark a site visited, again for want-to-go.

Serial sites and the Silk Roads

Asia's list includes some of the most sprawling serial properties on the planet. The Silk Roads: Chang'an–Tianshan Corridor is 33 component sites across China, Kazakhstan, and Kyrgyzstan, counted once. The Great Wall listing covers the whole system, not one section. Japan's Sacred Sites and Pilgrimage Routes in the Kii Mountains and its Kyoto listing each bundle dozens of temples. For a collector that's good news — one badge, many places — but it's worth knowing which component you actually visited. The tooltip on each pin gives the full official name, which usually makes the scope clear.