East Asia houses a fifth of humanity around a Chinese core
East Asia as a geocultural block usually lists China, Japan, Mongolia, the Koreas, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Macau—economies among the world’s largest. About 1.648 billion people make nearly a third of continental Asia and a fifth of Earth, clustered in megacities from Beijing–Tianjin to Seoul and Tokyo belts.
The region meets North Asia to the north, South-East Asia to the south, South Asia to the south-west and Central Asia to the west, with the Pacific on its eastern side. Chinese civilisation is counted among the world's earliest cradles, and the historian Ping-ti Ho set it beside the Fertile Crescent and ancient Greece. China was settled first and long led the region, while its neighbours picked and chose which Chinese customs to adopt. Japanese, Korean and Mongolian civilisations survive as independent states; Tibet, Manchuria and Ryukyu, now Okinawa, were absorbed. Taiwan was a major Austronesian centre before European and Chinese colonisation from the seventeenth century.
Faith is varied. Mahayana Buddhism, Confucianism, Taoism, ancestor worship and Chinese folk religion are common in the Chinese-speaking areas, Shinto in Japan and Christianity and the shamanic Musok tradition in Korea. Mongols and Tibetans follow Tengerism and Tibetan Buddhism, and shamanism persists among Manchus and other north-eastern peoples. Mandarin, Japanese and Korean are the main languages. The Han, Yamato, Koreans and Mongols are the largest ethnic groups, and 76 minority or indigenous groups have official recognition, 55 of them in mainland China.
Huge urban regions include Seoul–Incheon, Shanghai, Chongqing, Taipei, Osaka–Kyoto–Kobe, Busan and the Guangzhou–Hong Kong–Macau cluster. Yet the landlocked west of China and Mongolia are almost empty, and Mongolia has the lowest density of any sovereign country. Across the whole region density in 2025 was 133 people per square kilometre, roughly three times the world figure of 45.
Source: East Asia
