Eastern Asia

Eastern Asia holds roughly a fifth of the world's people and produces close to a third of its economic output, which makes it the heaviest of all the UN's subregions. The membership is short: China, Japan, Mongolia, North Korea, and South Korea, with Hong Kong, Macao, and Taiwan counted separately in the statistics. About 1.65 billion people live here, and China accounts for 1.42 billion of them. The region is bound together less by geography than by two millennia of Chinese cultural gravity — Confucian statecraft, Chinese characters, Buddhism arriving from India by way of the Silk Road — and it has been the world's economic center of mass for most of recorded history.

The land tilts east. It begins on the roof of the world, the Tibetan Plateau, where Everest sits at 8,849 meters on the Chinese-Nepali border, and steps down through the deserts and basins of the interior — the Gobi, the Taklamakan — to the loess uplands and finally to the crowded alluvial plains of the Yellow and Yangtze rivers, where most Chinese have always lived. Beyond the coast, a chain of volcanic island arcs runs from Japan south to Taiwan along the Pacific Ring of Fire, which is why Japan endures more than a thousand felt earthquakes a year. Monsoon rains water the south and east; the north and west are dry.

The last seventy years rearranged the region completely. Japan rebuilt from ruin into the world's second-largest economy by 1968; South Korea went from one of the poorest countries on earth to a per-capita income rivaling Western Europe's within a single lifetime; China's opening after 1978 pulled some 800 million people out of extreme poverty and remade global manufacturing. North Korea, sealed and nuclear-armed, went the other way. The unresolved status of Taiwan, which Beijing claims and which functions as a democracy of 23 million, is the most dangerous flashpoint in world politics. Meanwhile birth rates across the region have collapsed, and the demographic reckoning has already begun.

• China
  The world's most populous nation reborn as an economic superpower country in region
• Japan
  An archipelago empire of volcanoes, technology, and deep tradition country in region
• Mongolia
  The land of Genghis Khan, vast steppe and the Gobi Desert country in region
• North Korea
  The world's most isolated state on the northern half of the Korean peninsula country in region
• South Korea
  A technological powerhouse and cultural exporter on the southern peninsula country in region
• Gobi Desert
  A cold rain-shadow desert of Mongolia and northern China, famed for its dinosaur fossils defining feature
• Yangtze
  Asia's longest river, the spine of China defining feature
• Asia
  Earth's largest and most populous continent located in