Asia

The term "Asia" is believed to originate in the Bronze Age toponym () which originally referred only to a portion of northwestern Anatolia. The term appears in Hittite records recounting how a confederation of Assuwan states including Troy unsuccessfully rebelled against the Hittite king Tudhaliya I around 1400 BCE. Roughly contemporary Linear B documents contain the term (), seemingly in reference to captives from the same area. within the Roman Empire Herodotus used the term in reference to Anatolia and the territory of the Achaemenid Empire, in contrast to Greece and Egypt. He reports that Greeks assumed that Asia was named after the wife of Prometheus, but that Lydians say it was named after Asies, son of Cotys, who passed the name on to a tribe at Sardis. In Greek mythology, "Asia" ( or ) was the name of a "Nymph or Titan goddess of Lydia". The Iliad (attributed by the ancient Greeks to Homer) mentions two Phrygians in the Trojan War named Asios (literally 'Asian'); and also a marsh or lowland containing a marsh in Lydia as . The term was later adopted by the Romans, who used it in reference to the province of Asia, located in western Anatolia. One of the first writers to use Asia as a name of the whole continent was Pliny. == Definition ==

Asia–Europe boundary - Emba river - Kuma–Manych Depression B Ural Mountains - Ural river - Kuma–Manych DepressionC Ural Mountains - Ural river - Caucasus Mountains. The threefold division of the Old World into Africa, Asia, and Europe has been in use since the 6th century BCE, due to Greek geographers such as Anaximander and Hecataeus. Anaximander placed the boundary between Asia and Europe along the Phasis River (now the Rioni) in Georgia of Caucasus (from its mouth by Poti on the Black Sea coast, through the Surami Pass and along the Kura River to the Caspian Sea), a convention still followed by Herodotus in the 5th century BCE. During the Hellenistic period, this convention was revised, and the boundary between Europe and Asia was now considered to be the Tanais (the modern Don River). This is the convention used by Roman era authors such as Posidonius, Strabo and Ptolemy. The border between Asia and Europe was historically defined by European academics. In Sweden, five years after Peter's death, in 1730 Philip Johan von Strahlenberg published a new atlas proposing the Ural Mountains as the border of Asia. Tatishchev announced that he had proposed the idea to von Strahlenberg. The latter had suggested the Emba River as the lower boundary. Over the next century various proposals were made until the Ural River prevailed in the mid-19th century. The border had been moved perforce from the Black Sea to the Caspian Sea into which the Ural River projects. The border between the Black Sea and the Caspian is often placed along the crest of the Caucasus Mountains, although it is sometimes placed further north, This makes Egypt a transcontinental country, with the Sinai Peninsula in Asia and the remainder of the country in Africa. Asia–Oceania boundary The border between Asia and Oceania is usually placed somewhere in the Indonesian Archipelago, specifically in Eastern Indonesia. The Wallace Line separates the Asian and Wallacea biogeographical realms, a transition zone of deep water straits between the Asian and Australian continental shelves. Weber's Line split the region in two with regard to the balance of fauna between Asian origin or Australo-Papuan origin. The Maluku Islands (except the Aru Islands) are often considered to lie on the border of southeast Asia, with the Aru Islands and Western New Guinea, to the east of the Lydekker's Line, being wholly part of Oceania, as both lie on the Australian continental plate. Culturally, the Wallacea region denoted the transition between Austronesian and Melanesian people, with varying degrees of intermixing between the two. In general, the further west and coastal a region is, the stronger the Austronesian influences, and the further east and inland a region is, the stronger the Melanesian influences. The terms Southeast Asia and Oceania, devised in the 19th century, have had several vastly different geographic meanings since their inception. The chief factor in determining which islands of the Indonesian Archipelago are Asian has been the location of the colonial possessions of the various empires there (not all European). Lewis and Wigen assert, "The narrowing of 'Southeast Asia' to its present boundaries was thus a gradual process." Asia–North America boundary The Bering Strait and Bering Sea separate the landmasses of Asia and North America, as well as forming the international boundary between Russia and the United States. This national and continental boundary separates the Diomede Islands in the Bering Strait, with Big Diomede in Russia and Little Diomede in the United States. The Aleutian Islands are an island chain extending westward from the Alaskan Peninsula toward Russia's Komandorski Islands and Kamchatka Peninsula. Most of them are always associated with North America, except for the westernmost Near Islands group, which is on Asia's continental shelf beyond the North Aleutians Basin and on rare occasions could be associated with Asia, which could then allow the United States to be considered a transcontinental state. The Aleutian Islands are sometimes associated with Oceania, owing to their status as remote Pacific islands, and their proximity to the Pacific Plate. This is extremely rare however, due to their non-tropical biogeography, as well as their inhabitants, who have historically been related to the Indigenous peoples of the Americas. St. Lawrence Island in the northern Bering Sea belongs to the US state of Alaska and may be associated with either continent but is almost always considered part of North America, as with the Rat Islands in the Aleutian chain. At their nearest points, Alaska and Russia are separated by only . Ongoing definition Geographical Asia is a cultural artifact of European conceptions of the world, beginning with the Ancient Greeks, being imposed onto other cultures, an imprecise concept causing endemic contention about what it means. Asia does not exactly correspond to the cultural borders of its various types of constituents. From the time of Herodotus, a minority of geographers have rejected the three-continent system (Europe, Africa, Asia) on the grounds that there is no substantial physical separation between them. For example, Sir Barry Cunliffe, the emeritus professor of European archeology at Oxford, argues that Europe has been geographically and culturally merely "the western excrescence of the continent of Asia". Geographically, Asia is the major eastern constituent of the continent of Eurasia with Europe being a northwestern peninsula of the landmass. Asia, Europe and Africa make up a single continuous landmass—Afro-Eurasia—and share a common continental shelf. Almost all of Europe and a major part of Asia sit atop the Eurasian Plate, adjoined on the south by the Arabian and Indian Plate and with the easternmost part of Siberia (east of the Chersky Range) on the North American Plate. == History ==

Prehistory based on the Out of Africa theory. from the Pontic steppes and across Central Asia, and encounter with Ancient Northeast Asian populations. About 1.8 million years ago, Homo erectus left the African continent. This species is believed to have lived in East and Southeast Asia from 1.8 million to 110,000 years ago. Researchers believe that the modern human, or Homo sapiens, migrated about 60,000 years ago to South Asia along the Indian Ocean. Modern humans interbred with an archaic human species called Denisovans in Southeast Asia. Before the arrival of modern humans, Flores was occupied by Homo floresiensis, a small archaic human. Ancestors of East Eurasians split from Ancient West Eurasians about 46,000 years ago, migrating out of the hub in the Iranian Plateau. Evidence from full genomic studies suggests that the first people in the Americas diverged from Ancient East Asians about 36,000 years ago and expanded northwards into Siberia, where they encountered and interacted with a different Paleolithic Siberian population (known as Ancient North Eurasians), giving rise to both Paleosiberian peoples and Ancient Native Americans. Modern South Asians are descendants of a combination of Western Eurasian ancestries (notably Neolithic Iranian and Western Steppe Herder components) with a proposed indigenous East Eurasian component (termed Ancient Ancestral South Indians) closest to the non–West Eurasian part extracted from South Asian samples; distantly related to the Andamanese peoples, East Asians and Aboriginal Australians. Ancient era connected civilisations across Asia.The history of Asia can be seen as the distinct histories of several peripheral coastal regions: East Asia, South Asia, Southeast Asia, Central Asia, and West Asia. The coastal periphery was home to some of the world's earliest known civilisations, each of them developing around fertile river valleys. The civilisations in Mesopotamia, the Indus Valley and the Yellow River shared many similarities. These civilisations may well have exchanged technologies and ideas such as mathematics and the wheel. Other innovations, such as writing, seem to have been developed individually in each area. Cities, states and empires developed in these lowlands. The central steppe region had long been inhabited by horse-mounted nomads who could reach all areas of Asia from the steppes. The earliest postulated expansion out of the steppe is that of the Indo-Europeans, who spread their languages into West Asia, South Asia, and the borders of China, The Mongol Empire conquered a large part of Asia in the 13th century, an area extending from China to Europe. Before the Mongol invasion, Song dynasty reportedly had approximately 120 million citizens; the 1300 census which followed the invasion reported roughly 60 million people. The Black Death, one of the most devastating pandemics in human history, is thought to have originated in the arid plains of central Asia, where it then travelled along the Silk Road. Modern era European involvement in Asia became more significant from the Age of Discovery onward, with Iberian-sponsored sailors such as Christopher Columbus and Vasco da Gama paving the way for new routes from Atlantic Europe to Pacific Asia and the Indian Ocean respectively in the late 15th century. The Russian Empire also began to expand into northwestern Asia from the 17th century, and would eventually take control of all of Siberia and most of Central Asia by the end of the 19th century. Among non-European empires, the Ottoman Empire controlled Anatolia, most of the Middle East, North Africa and the Balkans from the mid 16th century onward, while in the 17th century, the Manchu conquered China and established the Qing dynasty. The Islamic Mughal Empire (preceded by the Delhi Sultanate of the 13th to early 16th century) and the Hindu Maratha Empire controlled much of India in the 16th and 18th centuries respectively. Western imperialism in Asia from the 18th to 20th centuries coincided with the Industrial Revolution in the West and the dethroning of India and China as the world's foremost economies. The British Empire first became dominant in South Asia, with most of the region being conquered by British traders in the late 18th and early 19th centuries before falling under direct British rule after a failed 1857 revolt; the 1869 completion of the Suez Canal, which increased British access to India, went on to further European influence over Africa and Asia. Around this time, Western powers started to dominate China in what later became known as the century of humiliation, with the British-supported opium trade and later Opium Wars resulting in China being forced into an unprecedented situation of importing more than it exported. Foreign domination of China was furthered by the Japanese colonial empire, which controlled some of East Asia and briefly much of Southeast Asia (which had earlier been taken over by the British, Dutch and French in the late 19th century), New Guinea and the Pacific islands; Japan's domination was enabled by its rapid rise that had taken place during the Meiji era of the late 19th century, in which it applied industrial knowledge learned from the West and thus overtook the rest of Asia. One significant influence on Japan had been the United States, which had begun projecting influence across the Pacific after its early-to-mid-19th century westward expansion. The breakup of the Ottoman Empire in the early 20th century led to the Middle East also being contested and partitioned by the British and French. Contemporary era With the end of World War II in 1945 and the wartime ruination of Europe and imperial Japan, many countries in Asia were able to rapidly free themselves of colonial rule. The independence of India came along with the carving out of a separate nation for the majority of South Asian Muslims, which in 1971 further split into Pakistan and Bangladesh; The Cold War in Asia strained relations between India and Pakistan and affected Asia more generally. The end of the Cold War and the Soviet Union by 1991 saw the independence of the five modern Central Asian countries. Some Arab countries took economic advantage of massive oil deposits that were discovered in their territory, becoming globally influential, though stability in the Middle East has been affected since 1948 by the Arab–Israeli conflict and American-led interventions. East Asian nations (along with Singapore in Southeast Asia) became economically prosperous with high-growth "tiger economies"; China, having undergone the reform and opening up under Deng Xiaoping, regained its place among the top two economies of the world by the 21st century. India has also grown significantly because of economic liberalisation that started in the 1990s, with extreme poverty now below 20%; India and China's rise has coincided with growing tensions between the two, with the Indo-Pacific now an actively contested area between China and counterbalancing forces. File:Anaximander world map (mul).svg|The threefold division of the Old World into Europe, Asia and Africa has been in use since the 6th century BCE, due to Greek geographers such as Anaximander and Hecataeus. File:A new universal atlas of the world.Asia.jpg|1825 map of Asia by Sidney Edwards Morse File:A Map of the Countries between Constantinople and Calcutta- Including Turkey in Asia, Persia, Afghanistan and Turkestan WDL11753.png|Map of western, southern, and central Asia in 1885 File:Modern Asia (1796).tif|The map of Asia in 1796, which also included the continent of Australia (then known as New Holland) File:Asien Bd1.jpg|1890 map of Asia == Geography ==

range is home to some of the planet's highest peaks. Asia is the largest continent on Earth. It covers 9% of the Earth's total surface area (or 30% of its land area), and has the longest coastline, at . Asia is generally defined as comprising the eastern four-fifths of Eurasia. It is located to the east of the Suez Canal and the Ural Mountains, and south of the Caucasus Mountains (or the Kuma–Manych Depression) and the Caspian and Black Seas. It is bounded on the east by the Pacific Ocean, on the south by the Indian Ocean and on the north by the Arctic Ocean. Asia is subdivided into 49 countries, five of them (Georgia, Azerbaijan, Russia, Kazakhstan and Turkey) are transcontinental countries lying partly in Europe. Geographically, Russia is partly and mostly in Asia, but is considered a European nation, both culturally and politically. The Gobi Desert is in Mongolia and the Arabian Desert stretches across much of the Middle East. The Yangtze in China is the longest river in the continent. The Himalayas between Nepal and China is the tallest mountain range in the world. Tropical rainforests stretch across much of southern Asia and coniferous and deciduous forests lie farther north. Between 1990–2000 the area of primary forest in Asia decreased by 1.06 million hectares per year, between 2000–2015 it decreased by 280 000 ha per year. File:Tundra in Siberia.jpg|Siberian tundra File:Rainforest cloud forming Kinabalu Sabah Borneo Kampong Kundasang 3.jpg|Rainforest in Borneo File:Kerala Backwaters, India.JPG|Kerala backwaters File:Naadam rider 2.jpg|Mongolian steppe File:1 li jiang guilin yangshuo 2011.jpg|South China Karst File:Taman Negara, Malaysia, Panoramic view.jpg|Taman Negara, Peninsular Malaysia File:Akkem Valley 2011.jpg|Altai Mountains File:Hunza Valley from Eagle Point.jpg|Hunza Valley File:Baa atoll islands.JPG|Atolls of the Maldives File:Red sand of the Wadi Rum desert.jpg|Wadi Rum in Jordan Main regions There are various approaches to the regional division of Asia. The following subdivision into regions is used, among others, by the United Nations Statistics Division (UNSD). This division of Asia into regions by the United Nations is done solely for statistical reasons and does not imply any assumption about political or other affiliations of countries and territories. • North Asia (Siberia) • Central Asia • West Asia (The Middle East or Near East and part of the Caucasus) • South Asia (Indian subcontinent) • East Asia (Far East) • Southeast Asia (East Indies and Indochina) Climate map for Asia Asia has extremely diverse climate features. Climates range from Arctic and subarctic in Siberia to tropical in southern India and Southeast Asia. It is moist across southeast sections, and dry across much of the interior. Some of the largest daily temperature ranges on Earth occur in western sections of Asia. The monsoon circulation dominates across southern and eastern sections, due to the presence of the Himalayas forcing the formation of a thermal low which draws in moisture during the summer. Southwestern sections of the continent are hot. Siberia is one of the coldest places in the Northern Hemisphere, and can act as a source of arctic air masses for North America. The most active place on Earth for tropical cyclone activity lies northeast of the Philippines and south of Japan. Climate change == Politics ==

for Asia, higher values more democratic == List of states and territories ==

Within the states mentioned above are several partially recognized countries with limited to no international recognition. None of them are members of the UN, however Palestine has observer state status: == Economy ==

and is the world's fourth-largest foreign exchange trading hub. Asia is both the largest continental economy in the world by both GDP nominal and PPP values and the world's fastest growing economic region. , China is by far the largest economy on the continent. It is followed by India, Japan, South Korea, Turkey, Indonesia, Saudi Arabia, and Taiwan, which are all ranked among the top 20 largest economies by both nominal GDP and PPP values. Based on Global Office Locations 2011, Asia dominated global office locations with 4 of the top 5 being in Asia: Hong Kong, Singapore, Tokyo and Seoul. Around 68% of international firms have an office in Hong Kong. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, the economy of China had an average annual growth rate of more than 8%. According to economic historian Angus Maddison, India had the world's largest economy for much of the past three millennia prior to the 19th century, accounting for 25% of the world's industrial output. China was the largest and most advanced economy on Earth for much of recorded history and shared the mantle with India. For several decades in the late twentieth century, Japan was the largest economy in Asia and second-largest in the world, after surpassing the Soviet Union (measured in net material product) in 1990 and Germany in 1968. This ended in 2010, when China overtook Japan to become the world's second largest economy. In 2025, India overtook Japan in terms of nominal GDP to become the world's 4th largest and Asia's 2nd largest economy. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, Japan's GDP by currency exchange rates was almost as large as that of the rest of Asia combined. According to Citigroup in 2011, 9 of 11 Global Growth Generator countries came from Asia driven by population and income growth. They are Bangladesh, China, India, Indonesia, Iraq, Mongolia, the Philippines, Sri Lanka, and Vietnam. Asia has three main financial centers: Hong Kong, Tokyo, and Singapore. Call centers and business process outsourcing firms (BPOs) are becoming major employers in India and the Philippines due to the availability of a large pool of highly skilled, English-speaking workers. The increased use of outsourcing has assisted the rise of India and the China as financial centers. Due to its large and extremely competitive information technology industry, India has become a major hub for outsourcing. Trade between Asian countries and countries on other continents is largely carried out via sea routes. The main route leads from the Chinese coast south via Hanoi to Jakarta, Singapore, and Kuala Lumpur, through the Strait of Malacca via Colombo to the southern tip of India, then via Malé to Mombasa in East Africa (see also Indo-Pacific), from there to Djibouti, then through the Red Sea and the Suez Canal into the Mediterranean (see also: Indo-Mediterranean), then via Haifa, Istanbul, and Athens to the northern Italian hub of Trieste, with its rail connections to Central and Eastern Europe, or further to Barcelona and around Spain and France to northern European ports. A far smaller part of the goods traffic runs via South Africa to Europe. A particularly significant part of Asian goods traffic is carried out on the Pacific Rim, toward Los Angeles and Long Beach. The melting of the Arctic is also paving the way for new shipping routes from Northeast Asia to Europe and North America. The land route to Europe is also the subject of construction projects, comparatively smaller in scope. Intra-Asian trade, including sea trade, is growing rapidly. In 2010, Asia had 3.3 million millionaires (people with net worth over US$1 million excluding their homes), slightly below North America's 3.4 million. In 2011, Asia topped Europe in the number of millionaires. Citigroup in The Wealth Report 2012 stated that the total wealth of people in Asia with over $100 million in assets exceeded that of their North American counterparts for the first time, as the world's "economic center of gravity" continued moving east. At the end of 2011, there were 18,000 people in Asia, mainly in Southeast Asia, China, and Japan, with at least $100 million in disposable assets, compared to North America with 17,000 and Western Europe with 14,000. Energy Asia’s electricity demand has quadrupled since 2000 (rising from 4,199 TWh to over 16,000 TWh in 2024). This growth, driven largely by China and increasingly by India, Indonesia, and Viet Nam, makes Asia the fastest-growing region for electricity demand globally, at about 5% per year. The region now accounts for about 36% of global primary energy consumption, a share projected to approach 50% by 2050.: 1468 Fossil fuels remain central in Asia: 66% of its energy is generated from fossil fuels, and Asia makes up 83% of the world's coal generation. However, coal is slowly being phased out and natural gas is displacing oil and oil products in various sectors, supported by policies and regulations. Natural gas demand in emerging market and developing economies in Asia expanded by around 6% in 2024, accounting for nearly 40% of incremental global gas demand. By 2040, Asia is expected to account for the majority of global coal use and over a quarter of natural gas consumption. China’s wind and solar capacity has surged in recent years, together overtaking that of coal, while in 2024 India become the world’s third largest generator of electricity from wind and solar. Nearly half of the world's new renewable energy capacity is built in Asia. == Demographics ==

East Asia had by far the strongest overall Human Development Index (HDI) improvement of any region in the world, nearly doubling average HDI attainment over the past 40 years, according to the report's analysis of health, education and income data. China, the second highest achiever in the world in terms of HDI improvement since 1970, is the only country on the "Top 10 Movers" list due to income rather than health or education achievements. Its per capita income increased a stunning 21-fold over the last four decades, also lifting hundreds of millions out of income poverty. Yet it was not among the region's top performers in improving school enrollment and life expectancy.Nepal, a South Asian country, emerges as one of the world's fastest movers since 1970 mainly due to health and education achievements. Its present life expectancy is 25 years longer than in the 1970s. More than four of every five children of school age in Nepal now attend primary school, compared to just one in five 40 years ago. and Baháʼí Faith originated in West Asia. Judaism, the oldest of the Abrahamic faiths, is practiced primarily in Israel, the indigenous homeland and historical birthplace of the Hebrew nation: which today consists both of those Jews who remained in the Middle East and those who returned from diaspora in Europe, North America, and other regions; though various diaspora communities persist worldwide. Jews are the predominant ethnic group in Israel (75.6%) numbering at about 6.1 million, although the levels of adherence to Jewish religion vary. Outside of Israel there are small ancient Jewish communities in Turkey (17,400), Azerbaijan (9,100), Iran (8,756), India (5,000) and Uzbekistan (4,000), among many other places. As of 2016, there are am estimated 14.4–17.5 million (2016, est.) Jews alive in the world today, making them one of the smallest Asian minorities, at roughly 0.3–0.4& of the total population of the continent. Christianity is a widespread religion in Asia, with more than 286 million adherents in 2010 according to Pew Research Center, and nearly 364 million according to Britannica Book of the Year 2014. Christians constitute around 12.6% of the total population of Asia. In the Philippines and Timor-Leste, Catholicism is the predominant religion; which are both Eastern Christian sects mainly adhered to Assyrian people or Syriac Christians. Vibrant indigenous minorities in West Asia are adhering to the Eastern Catholic Churches and Eastern Orthodoxy. Significant Christian communities also found in Central Asia, South Asia, Southeast Asia and East Asia. Islam, which originated in the Hejaz located in modern-day Saudi Arabia, is the second largest and most widely-spread religion in Asia with at least 1 billion Muslims constituting around 23.8% of the total population of Asia. With 12.7% of the world Muslim population, the country currently with the largest Muslim population in the world is Indonesia, followed by Pakistan (11.5%), India (10%), Bangladesh, Iran and Turkey. Mecca, Medina and Jerusalem are the three holiest cities for Islam in all the world. The Hajj and Umrah attract large numbers of Muslim devotees from all over the world to Mecca and Medina. Iran is the largest Shia country. The Druze originated in West Asia, is a monotheistic religion based on the teachings of figures like Hamza ibn Ali and al-Hakim bi-Amr Allah, and Greek philosophers such as Plato and Aristotle. The number of Druze people worldwide is around one million. Around 45–50% live in Syria, 35% to 40% live in Lebanon, and less than 10% live in Israel. Recently there has been a growing Druze diaspora. The Baháʼí Faith originated in Asia, in Iran (Persia), and spread from there to the Ottoman Empire, Central Asia, India, and Burma during the lifetime of Bahá'u'lláh. Since the middle of the 20th century, growth has particularly occurred in other Asian countries, because Baháʼí activities in many Muslim countries has been severely suppressed by authorities. Lotus Temple is a big Baháʼí temple in India. Indian and East Asian religions Akshardham Temple in Delhi, according to the Guinness World Records, is the ''World's Largest Comprehensive Hindu Temple''. Almost all Asian religions have philosophical character and Asian philosophical traditions cover a large spectrum of philosophical thoughts and writings. Indian philosophy includes Hindu philosophy and Buddhist philosophy. They include elements of nonmaterial pursuits, whereas another school of thought from India, Cārvāka, preached the enjoyment of the material world. The religions of Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism and Sikhism originated in India, South Asia. In East Asia, particularly in China and Japan, Confucianism, Taoism and Zen Buddhism took shape. , Hinduism has around 1.1 billion adherents. The faith represents around 25% of Asia's population and is the largest religion in Asia. However, it is mostly concentrated in South Asia. Over 80% of the populations of both India and Nepal adhere to Hinduism, alongside significant communities in Bangladesh, Pakistan, Bhutan, Sri Lanka and Bali, Indonesia. Many overseas Indians in countries such as Burma, Singapore and Malaysia also adhere to Hinduism. Buddhism has a great following in Mainland Southeast Asia and East Asia. Buddhism is the religion of the majority of the populations of Cambodia (96%), Thailand (95%), Burma (80–89%), Japan (36–96%), Bhutan (75–84%), Sri Lanka (70%), Laos (60–67%) and Mongolia (53–93%). Taiwan (35–93%), South Korea (23–50%), Malaysia (19–21%), Nepal (9–11%), Vietnam (10–75%), China (20–50%), Singapore (31%), North Korea (2–14%), and small communities in India and Bangladesh. The Communist-governed countries of China, Vietnam and North Korea are officially atheist, thus the number of Buddhists and other religious adherents may be under-reported. Jainism is found mainly in India and in overseas Indian communities such as the United States and Malaysia. Sikhism is found in Northern India and amongst overseas Indian communities in other parts of Asia, especially Southeast Asia. Confucianism is found predominantly in mainland China, South Korea, Taiwan and in overseas Chinese populations. Taoism is found mainly in mainland China, Taiwan, Malaysia and Singapore. In many Chinese communities, Taoism is easily syncretised with Mahayana Buddhism, thus exact religious statistics are difficult to obtain and may be understated or overstated. File:Traditional wedding at Meji-jingu 72570539 f30636e2ef o.jpg|Japanese wedding at the Meiji Shrine File:A day of devotion – Thaipusam in Singapore (4316108409).jpg|Hindu festival celebrated by Singapore's Tamil community File:Bar Mitzvah Western Wall.jpg|Bar mitzvah at the Western Wall in Jerusalem File:Feast of Black Nazarene, Quiapo, Manila.JPG|Catholic procession of the Black Nazarene in Manila File:Flickr - Government Press Office (GPO) - Nebi Shueib Festival.jpg|Druze dignitaries celebrating the Ziyarat al-Nabi Shu'ayb festival at the tomb of the prophet in Hittin File:Echmiadzin Cathedral, Armenia (5047080550).jpg|Christian Armenians praying at the Etchmiadzin Cathedral in Vagharshapat File:İstanbul 4258.jpg|Muslim men praying at the Ortaköy Mosque in Istanbul File:Buddhist alms in Si Phan Don.jpg|Buddhist monks in Laos collecting alms == Culture ==

The culture of Asia is a diverse blend of customs and traditions that have been practiced by the various ethnic groups of the continent for centuries. The continent is divided into six geographic sub-regions: Central Asia, East Asia, North Asia, South Asia, Southeast Asia, and West Asia. These regions are defined by their cultural similarities, including common religions, languages, and ethnicities. West Asia, also known as Southwest Asia or the Middle East, has cultural roots in the ancient civilisations of the Fertile Crescent and Mesopotamia, which gave rise to the Persian, Arab, Ottoman empires, as well as the Abrahamic religions of Judaism, Christianity and Islam. These civilisations, which are located in the Hilly flanks, are among the oldest in the world, with evidence of farming dating back to around 9000 BCE. Despite the challenges posed by the vast size of the continent and the presence of natural barriers such as deserts and mountain ranges, trade and commerce have helped to create a Pan-Asian culture that is shared across the region. Nobel laureates , winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1913, and Asia's first Nobel laureate Rabindranath Tagore, a Bengali dramatist and author from Santiniketan (now in West Bengal, India), won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1913, becoming the first Asian Nobel laureate. The prize was awarded for Tagore's prose works and poetry, which had a significant additional impact on national literatures throughout the Western world. Tagore also authored both the Indian and Bangladeshi national anthems. Other Asian writers who won Nobel Prize for literature include Yasunari Kawabata (Japan, 1968), Kenzaburō Ōe (Japan, 1994), Gao Xingjian (China, 2000), Orhan Pamuk (Turkey, 2006), Mo Yan (China, 2012), and Han Kang (South Korea, 2024). Some may consider the American writer, Pearl S. Buck, an honorary Asian Nobel laureate, having spent considerable time in China as the daughter of missionaries, and based many of her novels, namely The Good Earth (1931) and The Mother (1933), as well as the biographies of her parents for their time in China, The Exile and Fighting Angel, all of which earned her the Literature prize in 1938. Mother Teresa of India and Shirin Ebadi of Iran were awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for their significant and pioneering efforts for democracy and human rights, especially for the rights of women and children. Ebadi is the first Iranian and the first Muslim woman to receive the prize. Another Nobel Peace Prize winner is Aung San Suu Kyi from Burma for her peaceful and non-violent struggle under a military dictatorship in Burma. She is a nonviolent pro-democracy activist and leader of the National League for Democracy in Burma (Myanmar) and a noted prisoner of conscience. She is a Buddhist and was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1991. Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for "his long and non-violent struggle for fundamental human rights in China" on 8 October 2010. He is the first Chinese citizen to be awarded a Nobel Prize of any kind while residing in China. In 2014, Kailash Satyarthi from India and Malala Yousafzai from Pakistan were awarded the Nobel Peace Prize "for their struggle against the suppression of children and young people and for the right of all children to education". C.V. Raman is the first Asian to get a Nobel prize in Sciences. He won the Nobel Prize in Physics "for his work on the scattering of light and for the discovery of the effect named after him". Japan has won the most Nobel Prizes of any Asian nation with 24 followed by India which has won 13. Amartya Sen () is an Indian economist who was awarded the 1998 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for his contributions to welfare economics and social choice theory, and for his interest in the problems of society's poorest members. Other Asian Nobel Prize winners include Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar, Abdus Salam, Robert Aumann, Menachem Begin, Aaron Ciechanover, Avram Hershko, Daniel Kahneman, Shimon Peres, Yitzhak Rabin, Ada Yonath, Yasser Arafat, José Ramos-Horta and Bishop Carlos Filipe Ximenes Belo of Timor-Leste, Kim Dae-jung, and 13 Japanese scientists. Most of the said awardees are from Japan and Israel except for Chandrasekhar and Raman (India), Abdus Salam (Pakistan), Arafat (Palestinian Territories), Kim (South Korea), and Horta and Belo (Timor-Leste). In 2006, the Bangladeshi Muhammad Yunus of was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for the establishment of Grameen Bank, a community development bank that lends money to poor people, especially women. He is known for the concept of micro credit which, allows poor and destitute people to borrow money. The borrowers pay back money within the specified period and defaulting is very low. Yunus also became the leader of an interim government after the 2024 Bangladesh quota reform movement. The Dalai Lama received the Nobel Peace Prize, in Oslo, Norway in 1989. == See also ==