Asia

Asia is the largest continent on Earth. It covers the eastern part of the huge landmass that also includes Europe. Asia stretches from the Ural Mountains in Russia all the way east to Japan, and from the Arctic Ocean in the north to the Indian Ocean in the south. It is home to more than 4.7 billion people, which is more than all the other continents combined.

How big is Asia?

Asia covers about 17 million square miles of land. That is almost a third of all the land on Earth. To picture its size, you could fit the United States inside Asia nearly five times. Asia is so wide that when it is morning on its eastern edge in Japan, it is still the middle of the night on its western edge in Turkey.

There are 48 countries in Asia. The biggest is Russia, which stretches across both Asia and Europe. China and India each have more than 1.4 billion people. Together, those two countries hold more than a third of all the humans on the planet.

Mountains, deserts, and rivers

Asia has some of the most amazing landforms on Earth. The Himalayas run along its southern edge. These mountains include Mount Everest, the tallest mountain in the world, at 29,032 feet above sea level. That is more than five miles straight up.

In central Asia sits the Gobi Desert, a cold desert where winter temperatures can drop below minus 40 degrees Fahrenheit. To its west lies the Arabian Desert, one of the hottest places on Earth. Far to the north, Siberia is covered in frozen forest and tundra that stay snowy for much of the year.

Asia also has mighty rivers. The Yangtze in China is the longest river in Asia, flowing almost 4,000 miles from the mountains to the sea. The Ganges in India is sacred to more than a billion Hindus. The Tigris and Euphrates in the Middle East watered the world's first cities thousands of years ago.

Where civilization began

Many of the oldest human civilizations started in Asia. Around 5,000 years ago, people in Mesopotamia (now Iraq) built cities, invented writing, and created the first written laws. Around the same time, an early civilization grew along the Indus River in what is now Pakistan and India. Ancient China began along the Yellow River more than 4,000 years ago.

Asia is also the birthplace of every major world religion. Judaism, Christianity, and Islam began in the Middle East. Hinduism and Buddhism began in India. Confucianism and Taoism began in China. Billions of people around the world today follow beliefs that started on this continent.

The Silk Road

For almost 2,000 years, traders crossed Asia along a network of routes called the Silk Road. They carried silk, spices, paper, gunpowder, and ideas between China, India, the Middle East, and Europe. The Silk Road is how noodles, printing, and the compass reached other parts of the world. It is also how diseases like the Black Death spread across whole continents.

Asia today

Today, Asia is a mix of giant modern cities and ancient traditions. Tokyo, the capital of Japan, is the biggest city in the world by population. Shanghai, Mumbai, Seoul, and Jakarta each hold more than 10 million people. Some of these cities have glass skyscrapers and high-speed trains that travel faster than 200 miles per hour.

At the same time, millions of people in Asia still live in small villages and farm rice, tea, or wheat much as their families have for hundreds of years. In the mountains of Mongolia, some families still live in round tents called gers and herd horses and sheep. A traveler can ride a bullet train in the morning and visit a 1,000-year-old temple by afternoon.

Asia leads the world in making many things people use every day. Most smartphones, computers, and cars on Earth are built in Asian factories, especially in China, South Korea, Japan, and Taiwan.

A continent with many edges

Not everyone agrees on exactly where Asia ends. The border between Europe and Asia runs along the Ural Mountains, but geographers still debate the exact line. Some islands in the Pacific and the Middle East have been grouped differently at different times. This is a reminder that continents are ideas humans invented to describe the land, and the real Earth does not come with labels.

From the frozen tundra of Siberia to the tropical islands of Indonesia, Asia holds almost every kind of landscape and culture on the planet.