China Map

About China

The People's Republic of China covers about 9.6 million km² of East Asia, roughly the size of the United States. Depending on how disputed areas and coastal waters are counted, it is the third- or fourth-largest country in the world. Its 1.42 billion people (2025 UN estimate) made it the most populous country until India overtook it in 2023, and China's own statistics show the population falling every year since 2022. Beijing is the capital. The country is a one-party state led by the Chinese Communist Party, whose General Secretary, Xi Jinping, has also been state president since 2013.

China shares land borders with 14 countries, tied with Russia for the most of any country. Despite stretching more than 60 degrees of longitude from the Pamirs to the Ussuri River, the whole country officially keeps Beijing Time (UTC+8). In Xinjiang, many residents also use an unofficial local time two hours behind, so a Kashgar summer evening stays light until after 10 p.m. Beijing Time.

A three-step staircase

Chinese geographers describe the country as a staircase descending from west to east. The top step is the Tibetan Plateau, with an average elevation above 4,000 m, bounded by the Himalaya to the south and the Kunlun Mountains to the north. Mount Everest (8,849 m, as measured by a joint China–Nepal survey in 2020) stands on its southern rim at the border with Nepal. The middle step, mostly 1,000–2,000 m high, holds the great basins and plateaus: the Tarim Basin with the Taklamakan Desert, the Junggar Basin, the Inner Mongolian Plateau and the edge of the Gobi, the wind-blown Loess Plateau of Shaanxi and Shanxi, the Sichuan Basin and the karst uplands of the Yunnan–Guizhou Plateau. Within the middle step lies the Turpan Depression, which sinks 154 m below sea level, the lowest point in the country. The bottom step is the lowland east: the Northeast (Manchurian) Plain, the North China Plain, the Yangtze delta and the hills of the southeast coast.

Population follows the staircase. Geographers draw the "Hu Line" from Heihe on the Amur River to Tengchong in Yunnan. Southeast of it lives about 94% of China's population, on well under half of its land. The arid and high northwest, which takes in Xinjiang, Tibet, Qinghai and most of Inner Mongolia, is thinly settled.

Great rivers

The Tibetan Plateau is the source of many of Asia's major rivers, including the Yangtze, Yellow, Mekong, Salween and Brahmaputra (called the Yarlung Tsangpo in Tibet). The Yangtze (Chang Jiang), about 6,300 km long, is the longest river in Asia. It cuts through the Three Gorges, where the Three Gorges Dam is the world's largest hydropower station by installed capacity, and reaches the sea at Shanghai. The Yellow River (Huang He) loops north around the Ordos Desert and carries so much loess silt that its lower course has shifted many times, flooding the North China Plain where Chinese civilisation took shape. Further south, the Pearl River delta around Guangzhou, Shenzhen, Hong Kong and Macau is one of the world's densest manufacturing regions. In the northeast, the Amur (Heilong Jiang) and Ussuri form much of the border with Russia. Compare them with the continent's other great rivers on rivers of Asia, and see mountain ranges of Asia and deserts of Asia for the Himalaya, Kunlun, Tian Shan, Gobi and Taklamakan.

Climate and the best time to travel

Eastern China has a monsoon climate: hot, wet summers and dry winters whose severity rises sharply from south to north. Harbin in Heilongjiang regularly drops below −20 °C in January (hence its ice festival), Beijing's winters are cold, dry and often dusty, and Guangzhou and Hainan stay warm all year. Between mid-June and mid-July the "plum rains" (meiyu) soak the Yangtze valley. From July to September typhoons can hit the coast from Hainan to Zhejiang. The west is continental and arid, and Lhasa sits at about 3,650 m, where altitude matters more than season.

For most routes, the best months are April–May and September–October, when temperatures are mild and skies clearer. Avoid, if you can, the first week of October (the National Day "Golden Week") and the weeks around the Spring Festival (January or February), when hundreds of millions of people travel and trains and attractions are booked solid. China has the world's largest high-speed rail network, now more than 45,000 km, so trips such as Beijing to Shanghai take around four and a half hours by train.

Provinces and major cities

The PRC is divided into 22 provinces that it administers (it also counts Taiwan as a 23rd), five autonomous regions (Inner Mongolia, Guangxi, Tibet, Ningxia and Xinjiang), four directly governed municipalities (Beijing, Tianjin, Shanghai and Chongqing) and two special administrative regions, Hong Kong and Macau, which keep their own legal and currency systems under "one country, two systems".

• Shanghai is the largest city and the main financial centre, at the mouth of the Yangtze. It has the world's busiest container port by throughput.
• Beijing is the capital and seat of government, home to the Forbidden City, the Temple of Heaven and the most-visited stretches of the Great Wall at Badaling and Mutianyu.
• Guangzhou and Shenzhen are the twin engines of the Pearl River delta. Shenzhen grew from a small border town into an electronics and tech centre after it became China's first Special Economic Zone in 1980.
• Chengdu and Chongqing anchor the Sichuan Basin. Chengdu is known for its giant panda research base and Sichuan cuisine, and Chongqing is a hilly river port where the Jialing meets the Yangtze.
• Xi'an, capital of several dynasties including the Tang, was the eastern end of the Silk Road and lies near the Terracotta Army of the First Emperor.
• Hong Kong, a British colony until 1997, remains a global financial centre with its own currency, the Hong Kong dollar.
• Kashgar, an oasis city at the western edge of the Tarim Basin, is closer to Kabul than to Beijing and is the gateway to the Karakoram Highway into Pakistan.

From dynasties to the People's Republic

The earliest Chinese writing, on Shang-dynasty oracle bones, dates to around 1200 BCE. In 221 BCE the Qin unified the warring states under a single emperor, and the Han, Tang, Song, Yuan (Mongol), Ming and Qing dynasties followed. The best-preserved stretches of the Great Wall date from the Ming. The Qing, the last dynasty, reached the largest extent and fell in 1911–12, when the Republic of China was founded. After decades of civil war and the Japanese invasion, the Communist Party proclaimed the People's Republic on 1 October 1949, and the Republic of China government moved to Taiwan. Economic reforms from 1978 turned China into the world's largest manufacturer and exporter and its second-largest economy by nominal GDP, though income per person is still about US$13,900 (World Bank, 2025). Han Chinese make up about 91% of the population. The state recognises 55 other ethnic groups, the largest being the Zhuang, and Standard Mandarin (Putonghua) is the national language alongside Cantonese, Wu, Min, Tibetan, Uyghur, Mongolian and many others.

Claims and disputed borders

Several of China's boundaries are contested. The PRC claims Taiwan, which has been governed separately by the Republic of China since 1949 (see the Taiwan map). In the South China Sea, China's "nine-dash line" claim overlaps with the claims of Vietnam, the Philippines, Malaysia, Brunei and Taiwan; a 2016 arbitral tribunal ruled against it, and China rejects that ruling. On land, China and India dispute Aksai Chin, which China administers, and Arunachal Pradesh, which India administers. In the East China Sea, China and Taiwan both claim the Japanese-administered Senkaku Islands, which China calls the Diaoyu Islands.