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Mountain Ranges of Asia

Last reviewed on 2026-04-28.

Asia is the most mountainous continent. Its highest summits rise above 8,000 metres, far higher than anything in the Americas, Africa, or Europe. The mountains do far more than break the skyline: they decide where rain falls, where rivers flow, where borders are drawn, and where roads have to detour. Most of Asia’s great rivers begin in the same compact knot of peaks in the centre of the continent. Most of its desert basins lie in the rain shadow of one of these ranges. Following the major ranges in turn is one of the cleanest ways to make sense of the physical map of the continent.

The Himalayas

The Himalayas are the youngest of Asia’s great ranges and easily the highest. Running roughly 2,400 kilometres from west to east, they form the northern frontier of the Indian subcontinent and the southern edge of the Tibetan Plateau. Eight-thousanders along the chain include Everest on the Nepal–China border, Kanchenjunga on the India–Nepal border, Lhotse, Makalu, Cho Oyu, Dhaulagiri, Manaslu, Annapurna, and several others. The countries with significant Himalayan territory are India, Nepal, Bhutan, China (the Tibet Autonomous Region), and Pakistan.

The Himalayas are the engine of the South Asian monsoon. Moist air flowing in from the Indian Ocean rises against the southern slopes, drops most of its rain, and arrives on the Tibetan Plateau as cold, dry wind. That single weather pattern is the reason Bangladesh has flooded plains and Tibet has cold deserts within a few hundred kilometres of each other.

The Karakoram and the Hindu Kush

To the north-west of the Himalayas, the Karakoram is shorter but in some ways more extreme. K2, on the China–Pakistan border, is the second-highest mountain in the world. The Karakoram has the longest non-polar glaciers anywhere on Earth and the steepest, most unstable terrain of any major range. The countries it touches are Pakistan, India, China, and Afghanistan.

West of the Karakoram, the Hindu Kush runs from north-east Afghanistan into Pakistan. The Khyber Pass, cutting through the Hindu Kush, has carried armies and merchants between South and Central Asia for thousands of years. The Wakhan Corridor, the narrow finger of Afghan territory pushing east along the Hindu Kush, was created by nineteenth-century border treaties to keep the British and Russian empires from sharing a common boundary.

The Pamirs

The Pamirs are the high knot where the Himalayas, the Karakoram, the Hindu Kush, the Kunlun, and the Tian Shan all meet. Most of the range sits inside Tajikistan, with extensions into Afghanistan, China, Kyrgyzstan, and Pakistan. Average elevations are extreme — much of the Pamir region sits above 4,000 metres — and the area has historically been called the “roof of the world” in Persian and English.

The Tian Shan

The Tian Shan range, “heavenly mountains” in Chinese, runs roughly east-west across Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, and the Xinjiang region of China. The range divides the steppes of Central Asia from the Tarim Basin to its south. It is the source of the rivers that water Almaty, Bishkek, Tashkent, and most of the cotton-growing region of Central Asia. Its highest peaks include Khan Tengri and Jengish Chokusu (Pik Pobedy), both above 7,000 metres.

The Altai

The Altai mountains sit at the meeting point of China, Kazakhstan, Mongolia, and Russia. Lower than the Himalayan systems — peaks reach about 4,500 metres — but the Altai is environmentally distinctive: cold, snowy, and home to the rare snow leopard, the Argali sheep, and large stretches of taiga forest at lower elevations. The Ob and Irtysh rivers begin here.

The Caucasus

The Caucasus range divides Europe from West Asia, running between the Black Sea and the Caspian. Its highest peak, Elbrus in Russia, is technically European; the southern slopes lie in Georgia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan. The Caucasus has acted as a linguistic and ethnic refuge for thousands of years, with an unusual concentration of small language families packed into a small area.

The Zagros and the Iranian highlands

The Zagros mountains run for about 1,500 kilometres along western and southern Iran, with extensions into Iraq and Turkey. They are home to the headwaters of the Tigris and the major tributaries of the Euphrates. The Iranian plateau itself, raised between the Zagros, the Alborz (along Iran’s Caspian coast), and the eastern hills near the Afghan border, is high desert: most of central Iran is above 1,000 metres.

The Anatolian and Levantine ranges

Western Turkey consists of plateaus and mountain belts: the Pontic Mountains along the Black Sea coast and the Taurus Mountains running parallel to the Mediterranean. To the south, smaller ranges thread through Lebanon (the Mount Lebanon and Anti-Lebanon ranges), Syria, Israel, and Jordan, and along the western edge of the Arabian Peninsula in Saudi Arabia and Yemen.

South-east Asian ranges

Mainland Southeast Asia is shaped by a series of north-south mountain ranges — outliers of the eastern Himalayas — running through northern Myanmar, northern Laos, northern Thailand, and northern Vietnam. The Annamite Range forms much of the border between Vietnam and Laos. Maritime Southeast Asia has its own mountain story: Indonesia and the Philippines are part of the Pacific Ring of Fire and contain hundreds of active and dormant volcanoes, including Krakatoa, Mount Merapi, and Mayon.

The Japanese ranges and the Kamchatka chain

Mountainous terrain covers about three-quarters of Japan. The central Hida, Kiso, and Akaishi ranges (the Japanese Alps) run through Honshu, while Mount Fuji, the country’s symbol, is an active stratovolcano just south-west of Tokyo. The Korean peninsula has the Taebaek range running along its eastern coast in both North Korea and South Korea.

How mountains shape the rest of the map

For more on the countries these ranges cross, browse the regions: South Asia, Southeast Asia, East Asia, Central Asia, and West Asia. The main Asia map shows the topography of every country in context.