Asia Map Quiz: Find the Countries of Asia

How to play the Asia map quiz

The map covers Asia from the Mediterranean coast of Türkiye to Japan, and from Kazakhstan south to Indonesia and Timor-Leste. Russia and the land of Europe and Africa are gray, so you can focus on Asia itself.

• Click the map. The quiz names a country ("Click Mongolia") and you click it. A wrong click tells you what you hit.
• Type the name. One country is highlighted; type its name. "Burma" works for Myanmar and "Turkey" for Türkiye.
• Multiple choice. Pick from four names; the wrong answers are usually neighbors.
• Drag labels. Drag all 49 names onto the map, or tap a name and then its country.

Practice is untimed and brings misses back, the Quiz is timed with three tries per country, and Challenge is a 60-second streak game. Each keeps its own best score on this device.

How many countries are in Asia?

Asia is the largest continent by area and by population: about 4.8 billion people, close to 60 percent of everyone on Earth. This quiz has 49 countries. That's the 47 UN members the United Nations places in Asia, plus Palestine and Taiwan, which most atlases draw as countries.

Two giants dominate the map. China has the largest land area entirely in Asia, and India passed China as the country with the most people in 2023, according to the United Nations; each has over 1.4 billion. At the other end, the Maldives is Asia's smallest country, a chain of coral islands with a land area of about 300 km².

The five regions of Asia

The UN places Iran and Afghanistan in South Asia; many textbooks put Iran in the Middle East instead. The fact cards and hints use the UN regions. For deeper practice, each region has its own quiz: the Middle East map quiz, the East Asia map quiz and the Southeast Asia map quiz.

Physical geography of Asia

The Dead Sea, on the border of Israel, Palestine and Jordan, is the lowest land on Earth, more than 400 m below sea level.

Where Asia meets the other continents

Asia shares a single landmass with Europe, and together they're sometimes called Eurasia. The usual dividing line runs down the Ural Mountains and the Ural River to the Caspian Sea, then along the Caucasus Mountains to the Black Sea and through the Bosporus strait in Istanbul. Countries on that line, such as Russia, Kazakhstan and Türkiye, have land on both sides.

Asia touches Africa at the Sinai Peninsula, the part of Egypt east of the Suez Canal. The canal, finished in 1869, is the usual boundary, so Egypt is counted in Africa even though a small part of it is in Asia. In the far northeast, only the Bering Strait, about 82 km (51 mi) wide, separates Russia from Alaska and North America. To the southeast, the islands of Indonesia and Timor-Leste lead toward Australia and Oceania; New Guinea is split between Indonesia and Papua New Guinea, which this quiz counts in Oceania.

Because the continent is so big, the map uses an equal-area projection centered on Asia. Countries keep their true sizes relative to each other, so you can see that Kazakhstan, the world's largest landlocked country, is bigger than all of Western Europe.

Tips to memorize the countries of Asia

1. Place China and India first. Most of Asia's other countries border one of them. Then add Mongolia above China and Kazakhstan to the west.
2. Learn the "-stans" as a set. Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan are Central Asia; Afghanistan and Pakistan are just south. "-stan" means "land of" in Persian.
3. Use the peninsulas. The Arabian Peninsula (Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Oman, the UAE, Qatar), the Korean Peninsula (North and South Korea) and the Indochinese Peninsula (Myanmar, Thailand, Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam) each make a neat group.
4. Count the islands. Japan, Taiwan, the Philippines, Indonesia, Sri Lanka, the Maldives, Singapore, Cyprus and Bahrain are islands or island chains; Timor-Leste shares an island with Indonesia.
5. Zoom for the Gulf. Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar and the UAE line the Persian Gulf. Use the magnifier until they're easy.
6. Finish on paper. Print the blank map of Asia and fill it in from memory.

Asia capitals that trip people up

Palestine is left out of the capitals round because its capital is disputed: it names East Jerusalem, and its government works from Ramallah.

Keep learning about Asia

Try the Asian flags quiz next, or move on to the world map quiz. History programs that cover ancient China, India and Mesopotamia make Asia's map much more memorable; the programs below are favorites with homeschool families.