Asia

A Nabataean trading capital carved directly into rose-red sandstone cliffs and reached through a 1.2 km slot canyon.

Not one wall but many, layered over two millennia and running more than 21,000 km across ridgelines and desert.

A mausoleum of white marble that shifts from pink to pearl to gold as the light moves across the day.

The largest religious monument on Earth, a Hindu temple later turned Buddhist, ringed by a moat 190 m wide.

Its dome held the record as the world's largest interior space for close to a thousand years.

Over 8,000 clay soldiers, each with a different face, buried to guard one emperor and found by farmers in 1974.

Twin towers joined by a skybridge that is deliberately not bolted to either tower, so it can slide as they sway.

Roughly 1,600 limestone karst towers rising from jade water, hollowed through with caves and hidden lagoons.

Thousands of quartz-sandstone spires that float above the cloud layer on humid mornings.

The Valley of the Moon — sandstone islands in red sand, and the stand-in for Mars in a dozen films.

Volcanic tuff eroded into fairy chimneys, hollowed into churches and underground cities eighteen storeys deep.

Sixteen hundred temples and a thousand years as the imperial capital, spared from wartime bombing.

The only city standing on two continents, and capital of three successive empires.

A city-state that grew its land area by a quarter through reclamation, and calls itself a city in a garden.

Home to the tallest building on Earth, on a coastline that was mostly fishing villages within living memory.

The flattest country on Earth — its highest natural point is under 2.4 m above the sea.

Limestone cliffs, hidden lagoons reached only at low tide, and an 8 km navigable underground river.

Volcanic ridges terraced into rice paddies watered by subak, a cooperative irrigation system a thousand years old.

A third of its plants grow nowhere else, including dragon's blood trees shaped like upturned umbrellas.

Twelve days on foot from Lukla to 5,364 m, through Sherpa villages and across the Khumbu icefall's doorstep.

One of the oldest continuously inhabited cities anywhere, where eighty-eight ghats step down into the Ganges.

Around ten thousand vermilion torii gates, each one donated, climbing four kilometres up a sacred hill.

More than 2,200 surviving temples on a bend of the Irrawaddy, out of over ten thousand once built.