China 🇨🇳

China lies in Eastern Asia, part of Asia. The long form of the name is People's Republic of China. Beijing is the capital.

Around 1.41 billion people live there, placing it 2nd of 249 by population — between India above it and the United States below. Within Eastern Asia alone it is the 1st largest of 8 and the 1st most populous.

By land area it covers 9,706,961 km², which ranks it 4th of the 249 countries and territories in this dataset — just behind Canada and just ahead of the United States. Put next to a country most people can picture, it is almost exactly the same size as Canada.

Density comes out at around 145 people per square kilometre, which makes it more crowded than the typical entry on this list. The median across all 249 entries here is about 91 per square kilometre.

People from China are called Chinese.

Officially it is monolingual: Chinese. It shares that with Hong Kong, Macau, Singapore and Taiwan.

Inside Asia it places 2nd of 50 by population, and it accounts for 86% of everyone living in Eastern Asia.

Within Eastern Asia, China is the most populous of the 8 entries this site lists, and the largest by area as well. Japan is next in line by population.

Every entry in Eastern Asia has its own guide here, so if you want to work through the whole neighbourhood rather than one country at a time, Japan is the place to carry on.

• 🇯🇵 Japan
• 🇨🇳 China

Its reference point sits at 35.0° north and 105.0° east, which puts it in the northern hemisphere, roughly 3,896 km from the equator, in what geographers would call temperate latitudes.

The Tropic of Cancer passes across it. Countries on the same parallel, far away in longitude, include Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria.

Its land neighbours number 16: Afghanistan, Bhutan, Myanmar, Hong Kong, India, Kazakhstan, Nepal, North Korea, Kyrgyzstan, Laos, Macau, Mongolia, Pakistan, Russia, Tajikistan and Vietnam. The largest of them by area is Russia, while the most populous is India. Together those neighbours hold about 2.16 billion people.

It has both a coastline and land borders, which is the most common arrangement of all.

Put next to every other entry on this site, China ranks 4th of 249 by area and 2nd by population. That works out at 6.5% of the combined land area of all 249 entries and 17.3% of their combined population. Those denominators matter: this list includes territories and dependencies as well as UN member states, so a rank here is not the same as a rank among sovereign countries.

For a sense of scale, the entries immediately either side of China in the size ordering are Canada at 9,984,670 km² and United States at 9,372,610 km², against China's 9,706,961 km². If you can already picture one of those, you can picture this one.

Density tells a different story from either raw figure. China averages 145 people per square kilometre of total area, which makes it middling in density — 88th of the 247 entries that have both a population and a measured area. Total area includes inland water, so the true figure for habitable land is higher than this.

China does not have the Chinese yuan to itself. It is one of 2 entries on this site that use the currency, whose code is CNY, and the other one is listed below. A shared currency usually points at something real — a monetary union, a currency board, a former colonial administration, or a small economy pegging itself to a large neighbour's money — and it means a price quoted in CNY travels further than you might expect.

Language reaches wider still. Chinese is listed for 5 entries here, China among them, so a visitor who speaks it can be understood across a large part of the map. Shared language tends to outlive the empires, trade routes and migrations that spread it, which is why the linguistic map and the political one rarely line up.

Money there is the Chinese yuan (¥, CNY). No other entry in this dataset uses it, so the currency is specific to China.

Websites there use the .cn domain. To phone it from abroad you dial +86. Its ISO codes are cn and CHN, which is what most databases and flag files use.

If a quiz asks for the capital of China, the answer is Beijing.

As a sovereign state it is among the 192 UN members listed here. The other 57 entries are territories, dependencies or observers, which is why totals on this site run to 249 rather than the familiar 195.