According to Countryaah.com, the Asian continent is divided into six regions: North Asia, Central Asia, Middle East, South Asia, East Asia and Southeast Asia. The boundaries may vary from time to time, due to the fact that the division is sometimes interpreted differently, but we use the official division, which was determined by the United Nations.
Asia is made up of the following regions:
1st place: North Asia – the largest region in terms of area
In terms of area, North Asia is the largest region on the Asian continent. Only Russia is counted among them, which in turn is divided into three federal circles. These include the Asian part of the Urals, Siberia and the Far East. The entire area is around 13 million square kilometers. Despite its size, it is sparsely populated, with just 38 million people living there, which is largely due to the large steppes, tundra, deserts and mountains. The Far East has the fewest inhabitants with just under 6.5 million, followed by the Urals with 12 million and Siberia with 19.5 million.
2nd place: East Asia – China and surrounding countries
With over 6.5 million square kilometers, East Asia is the second largest region on the Asian continent. The population density is enormously high, over 1.54 billion people live in East Asia. This region has six countries, with most people living in China. Mongolia also belongs to East Asia (sometimes this is counted as North Asia), the Republic of China, also known as Taiwan, South Korea, North Korea and the island state of Japan. What is often forgotten in East Asia, but is still part of it, is the Hong Kong and Macau Special Administrative Zones. Two metropolises that include over 260 islands.
3rd place: Middle East – predominantly desert and Middle East
In third place is the Near East, also called West Asia or Southwest Asia, with just over six million square kilometers. This part of Asia includes the 20 countries Egypt (Sinai peninsula only), Armenia, Azerbaijan, Bahrain, Georgia, Iraq, Iran, Israel, Yemen (without Socotra Island), Jordan, Qatar, Kuwait, Lebanon, Oman, Palestine, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Turkey (Asian part), United Arab Emiratesand Cyprus. The region is mainly characterized by deserts. Nevertheless, around 300 million people live here, most of them in Iran (75 million), the least in Cyprus and Bahrain (1 million).
4th place: South Asia – the most populous region
South Asia is 5.3 million square kilometers and is also known as the Middle East. However, this name is now out of date. The following countries belong to South Asia: Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, the Maldives, Nepal, Pakistan and Sri Lanka. The region is one of the most populous in the world, around a fifth of the world’s population lives here. In numbers, there are 1.6 billion people who live here. Savannah, mountains, tundra, grasslands and tropical rainforest are the characteristics of this region in the south of the Asian continent.
5th place: Central Asia – mountains, deserts and steppe landscape
Central Asia is also called Central Asia. In the history of this region, the composition of the countries changed again and again. Today the five states of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan belong to Central Asia. Around 68 million people come from a size of around four million square kilometers. Despite this large population (almost twice as much as in North Asia), there are a lot of steppes, deserts and especially mountains. Most of the people live in the metropolitan areas.
6th place: Southeast Asia – the smallest but most popular holiday destination
The region of Southeast Asia is around four million square kilometers large and is thus just behind last in Central Asia. The numerous island states are particularly striking in this area of the Asian continent. Southeast Asia today includes Brunei, Indonesia, Cambodia, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, East Timor, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam. Almost 600 million people live in the eleven countries, with Indonesia having the largest population with 240 million and Brunei with 400,000 the least. Indonesia is also the largest island country in the world with over 17,500 islands.
Conclusion: Big differences in both population density and landscape
Different countries also have different sizes. The smallest nation in Asia is the Maldives with an area of 298 square kilometers. The largest nation is Russia with 13,122,850 square kilometers in the Asian part. Russia itself is 17,075,400 square kilometers.
The large, wide country in Russia, despite its size, is sparsely populated with its 38 million inhabitants. In Russia only 9 people live in one square kilometer. In contrast, Bangladesh has 991 people per square kilometer.
