Taiwan 🇹🇼

Taiwan is a self-governing state with its own government, currency and armed forces, but limited formal recognition and no UN seat. That is why it appears among the 249 entries here but not among the 192 UN member states: the two lists answer different questions, and neither one is simply "the countries of the world".

Recognition is a political fact rather than a geographic one, and it is not all-or-nothing — a state can hold a seat at some international bodies, issue its own passports and run its own currency while a portion of the world declines to recognise it. Judge the practical questions on their own evidence rather than on the UN membership list alone.

Not holding a UN seat is not the same as having no self-government, and the administrative details make that clear. Taiwan has 5 of the five markers of separate administration tracked on this page — its own currency, its own dialling code, its own internet domain, its own iso codes and a designated capital. In day-to-day terms it is run substantially as its own jurisdiction.

• Its own currencyTWD
• Its own dialling code+886
• Its own internet domain.tw
• Its own ISO codestw / TWN
• A designated capitalTaipei

Taiwan sits in Eastern Asia, part of Asia. It is a self-governing state with its own government, currency and armed forces, but limited formal recognition and no UN seat. Treaties and official documents call it Republic of China (Taiwan). Government sits in Taipei.

It covers 36,193 km², which ranks it 138th of the 249 countries and territories in this dataset — just behind Bhutan and just ahead of Guinea-Bissau. That makes it a fraction smaller than Switzerland.

It is home to roughly 23.4 million people, placing it 60th of 249 by population — between Burkina Faso above it and Sri Lanka below. Measured only against its own subregion, it is 6th of 8 in size and 5th in population.

Plotted on a globe it falls at 23.5° north, 121.0° east, which puts it in the northern hemisphere, roughly 2,616 km from the equator, in what geographers would call subtropical latitudes.

The Tropic of Cancer runs through or very close to it. Follow that same latitude east or west and you reach Saudi Arabia, Mexico and Libya — places that share its distance from the equator but little else.

There is no land frontier at all — every boundary it has is a coastline. That puts it among the 85 entries of 249 here with no land neighbours, a group made up mostly of islands and island groups.

Taiwan has no land border with any country, which changes what "nearby" means. Measured centre to centre in a straight line, the closest other entry on this site is Hong Kong, roughly 710 km away. These are approximate distances between representative points, not the shortest crossing between two shorelines, so treat them as a sense of scale rather than a sailing chart.

No land border also means no land crossing: everything and everyone arrives by sea or by air. That single fact drives a lot of what follows on this page, from how goods reach the shops to why Taiwan's dialling code and internet domain are worth knowing before you travel.

Density comes out at around 647 people per square kilometre, which makes it densely populated. Half the entries in this dataset fall below roughly 91 per square kilometre.

The one official language is Chinese. It shares that with China, Hong Kong, Macau and Singapore.

People from Taiwan are called Taiwanese.

Against Asia as a whole it is the 23rd most populous of 50 entries, and it accounts for 1.4% of everyone living in Eastern Asia.

The New Taiwan dollar (TWD) is used only in Taiwan 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.

Language reaches wider still. Chinese is listed for 5 entries here, Taiwan 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.

Zoom in from the world to Eastern Asia and Taiwan sits 5th of 8 by population and 6th by area. Its immediate company in that ordering is North Korea just above and Hong Kong just below, which is a more honest comparison set than a global league table.

China is the largest of the group by population, and every entry in Eastern Asia has its own page here if you want to work through the whole neighbourhood rather than one country at a time.

• 🇰🇵 North Korea
• 🇭🇰 Hong Kong
• 🇨🇳 China