Indonesia 🇮🇩

Indonesia is an independent state in South-Eastern Asia, and a member of the United Nations. Treaties and official documents call it Republic of Indonesia. Its seat of government is Jakarta.

The land area is 1,904,569 km², which ranks it 16th of the 249 countries and territories in this dataset — just behind Mexico and just ahead of Sudan. That makes it almost exactly the same size as Sudan.

It is home to roughly 283.5 million people, placing it 4th of 249 by population — between the United States above it and Pakistan below. Among the 11 entries in South-Eastern Asia it ranks 1st by area and 1st by population.

Spread across 1,904,569 km², that works out at about 149 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.

Officially it is monolingual: Indonesian. No other entry in this dataset lists Indonesian, so on this list it stands alone.

Someone from Indonesia is an Indonesian.

Against Asia as a whole it is the 3rd most populous of 50 entries, and it accounts for 41% of everyone living in South-Eastern Asia.

Put next to every other entry on this site, Indonesia ranks 16th of 249 by area and 4th by population. That works out at 1.3% of the combined land area of all 249 entries and 3.5% 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 Indonesia in the size ordering are Mexico at 1,964,375 km² and Sudan at 1,886,068 km², against Indonesia's 1,904,569 km². If you can already picture one of those, you can picture this one.

Density tells a different story from either raw figure. Indonesia averages 149 people per square kilometre of total area, which makes it middling in density — 85th 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.

Within South-Eastern Asia, Indonesia is the most populous of the 11 entries this site lists, and the largest by area as well. Philippines is next in line by population.

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

• 🇵🇭 Philippines
• 🇮🇩 Indonesia

Its reference point sits at 5.0° south and 120.0° east, which puts it in the southern hemisphere, roughly 557 km from the equator, in what geographers would call the equatorial belt.

It is one of the countries that the equator crosses. Countries on the same parallel, far away in longitude, include Tanzania, Burundi and Seychelles.

3 countries share a land border with it: Timor-Leste, Malaysia and Papua New Guinea. The largest of them by area is Papua New Guinea, while the most populous is Malaysia. Together those neighbours hold about 47.5 million people.

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

The Indonesian rupiah (IDR) is used only in Indonesia among the 249 entries on this site. Its own currency is one of the clearest markers of an economy that sets its own monetary policy rather than importing somebody else's.

Indonesian is listed for Indonesia and for no other entry on this site. A language confined to one country is unusual, and it is normally a sign of long isolation or of deliberate revival.

Money there is the Indonesian rupiah (Rp, IDR). That currency appears nowhere else on this list.

Jakarta is the city to remember for this country.

Websites there use the .id domain. Calls from overseas start with +62. Standard country codes: id and IDN.

Indonesia is one of the 192 UN member states in this dataset. The other 57 entries are territories, dependencies or observers, which is why totals on this site run to 249 rather than the familiar 195.