Natural wonders of East Asia

The wonders of East Asia in the atlas so far. This region grows as the atlas expands.

Guilin & the Li River Karst

Guangxi, southern China

The landscape of Chinese scroll paintings brought to life — thousands of rounded limestone peaks rising from green plains and the winding Li River, mirrored in still water beneath drifting mist.

Karst landscape East Asia

Huanglong

Sichuan Province, China

A valley paved with thousands of terraced travertine pools in gold, turquoise, and blue — a three-kilometre cascade of mineral basins climbing toward snow peaks.

Living terraces East Asia

Huangshan

Anhui Province, China

The 'Yellow Mountains' — a range of granite peaks and wind-sculpted pines that rise from seas of cloud, the landscape that inspired centuries of Chinese painting and poetry.

Mountain East Asia

Jeju Island

Jeju Province, South Korea

A volcanic island crowned by South Korea's highest peak, riddled with the world's finest lava-tube caves and edged by a sunrise crater rising straight from the sea.

Volcano East Asia

Jiuzhaigou

Sichuan Province, China

A valley of impossibly blue and turquoise lakes, terraced waterfalls, and travertine pools stepping down from snow peaks on the edge of the Tibetan Plateau.

Lake East Asia

Kamchatka Volcanoes

Kamchatka Peninsula, Russian Far East

A remote peninsula bristling with snow-capped volcanoes, geysers, and hot springs — one of the most volcanically active places on Earth, roamed by some of the world's largest brown bears.

Volcano East Asia

Lake Baikal

Siberia, Russia

The deepest and oldest lake on Earth — a vast Siberian sea holding a fifth of the world's unfrozen fresh water, its waters so clear you can see 40 metres down, and freezing each winter into sheets of turquoise ice.

Lake East Asia

Mount Fuji

Honshū, Japan

Japan's highest and most revered peak — an almost perfectly symmetrical, snow-capped volcano rising to 3,776 metres, an enduring emblem of the country and a place of pilgrimage for centuries.

Volcano East Asia

Shiretoko

Hokkaido, northern Japan

A wild peninsula at the edge of Japan where drift ice arrives each winter — feeding an extraordinary food chain of brown bears, salmon, sea eagles, and whales.

Forest East Asia

The Gobi Desert

Southern Mongolia (and northern China)

A vast cold desert of gravel plains, singing sand dunes, and flaming red cliffs — a land of extremes where dinosaur fossils weather out of the rock and Bactrian camels cross the steppe.

Desert & dunes East Asia

The Three Gorges

Chongqing & Hubei, China

A 200-kilometre procession of sheer limestone gorges where the Yangtze — Asia's greatest river — cuts between cliffs rising a thousand metres, long celebrated in Chinese poetry and painting.

River East Asia

Yakushima

Kagoshima, southern Japan

A mossy, rain-soaked island of ancient cedar forest — home to yakusugi trees thousands of years old, whose primeval green world helped inspire the landscapes of Studio Ghibli.

Forest East Asia

Zhangjiajie (Wulingyuan)

Hunan Province, China

A forest of thousands of towering quartzite-sandstone pillars rising hundreds of metres from misty subtropical forest — an ethereal landscape of floating peaks that helped inspire the world of Avatar.

Rock formation East Asia

Zhangye Danxia

Gansu Province, China

Hills painted in stripes of red, orange, gold, and green — a landscape of 'rainbow mountains' where millions of years of layered sediment have been folded and eroded into vivid bands of colour.

Rock formation East Asia