China

China is a very big country in Asia.

It has high mountains, big deserts and long rivers. It has busy cities too. The capital city is called Beijing.

China is the largest country in Asia. It covers almost all of East Asia and is nearly as big as the whole of Europe. Its land is high in the west and low in the east, so its big rivers flow east toward the sea.

China has some of the highest mountains on Earth, very dry, desert-like lands in the northwest and a warm, rainy monsoon climate in the southeast. Its capital is Beijing. About 1.4 billion people lived in China at the end of 2025, yet some huge areas of the country have very few people.

China, officially the People's Republic of China, occupies nearly the entire East Asian landmass and covers about one-fourteenth of Earth's land area, almost as much as Europe. Britannica notes that its relief includes both the world's highest peak and one of its lowest places, and that its climate runs from extremely dry, desert-like conditions in the northwest to a tropical monsoon in the southeast, with the greatest north-south temperature contrast of any country.

The National Bureau of Statistics counted 1,404.89 million people at the end of 2025, 3.39 million fewer than a year earlier, and 67.9 percent of them lived in urban areas. Britannica reports that United Nations estimates showed India passing China in population in 2023. China has 22 provinces, 5 autonomous regions, 4 municipalities (Beijing, Shanghai, Tianjin and Chongqing) and 2 special administrative regions (Hong Kong and Macau), governed from Beijing.

Beijing is the capital of China.

In Beijing there is a huge old palace called the Forbidden City. The Great Wall winds over the hills. Near Xi'an, clay soldiers stand in long rows.

Beijing is China's capital and a center of culture. In the middle of the city is the Forbidden City, a huge palace built between 1406 and 1420, where 24 emperors took the throne over about 500 years. The Great Wall was built and rebuilt over nearly 2,000 years along China's northern border; with all its parts it is more than 20,000 kilometers long.

Near the city of Xi'an, workers built a giant tomb for China's first emperor, with thousands of life-size soldiers and horses made of baked clay, called terracotta. Shanghai, on the coast, is China's main industrial city.

Beijing, the capital, is also the country's cultural, economic and communications center; Shanghai is the main industrial city and Hong Kong the leading commercial center and port. The Forbidden City, built by the Ming emperor Zhu Di between 1406 and 1420, saw the enthronement of 14 Ming and 10 Qing emperors over 505 years (inscribed 1987). The Great Wall (inscribed 1987) was built continuously from the 3rd century BCE to the 17th century CE along the northern frontier, running from Shanhaiguan in Hebei to Jiayuguan in Gansu; UNESCO gives a total length of more than 20,000 km.

The Mausoleum of the First Qin Emperor near Xi'an, begun in 246 BCE, includes nearly 200 pits holding thousands of life-size terracotta soldiers and horses and bronze chariots; the historian Sima Qian wrote that workers from every province labored on it until the emperor's death in 210 BCE. The Grand Canal (inscribed 2014), built in sections from the 5th century BCE and joined into one system under the Sui dynasty in the 7th century CE, runs from Beijing to Zhejiang and is described by UNESCO as the largest civil engineering project before the Industrial Revolution.

China has very tall mountains in the west.

The tallest mountain in the world is on its border. Long rivers flow from the mountains to the sea. In the northwest there are big, sandy deserts.

China's land is like a giant staircase. The top step is the Plateau of Tibet, on average more than 4,000 meters high, the highest plateau in the world. Mount Everest, the highest mountain on Earth, is on China's border with Nepal. The middle step has basins and plateaus, and the bottom step, in the east, is hills and plains near the sea.

The Yangtze, 6,300 kilometers long, is the longest river in Asia, and the Yellow River flows across the north. Winters are very different from north to south: in January it averages −28 °C in the far north but 22 °C on the southern coast of Hainan Island.

Britannica divides China's surface into three steps: the Plateau of Tibet, averaging well over 4,000 m, the loftiest highland in the world; a middle step of plateaus and basins (the Mongolian Plateau, Tarim Basin, Loess Plateau, Sichuan Basin and Yunnan-Guizhou Plateau) at about 900 to 1,800 m; and an eastern step of hills and plains mostly below 450 m. About one-third of China is mountains. Mount Everest (8,849 m in Wikidata) stands on the China-Nepal border, while Lake Ayding in the Turfan Depression lies 155 m below sea level. The northward push of the Indian plate beneath southern Asia raised the southwestern mountains and plateaus and makes much of China earthquake-prone.

The Yangtze, 6,300 km long, is the longest river in China and Asia and the third-longest in the world. In January the mean temperature falls from 22 °C on Hainan's southern coast to −28 °C in northern Heilongjiang, yet in July Guangzhou and Beijing differ by only about 3 °C. In the south, the South China Karst (inscribed 2007, with the Guilin Karst added in 2014) is UNESCO's world type area for karst landforms in the humid tropics and subtropics.

Giant pandas live in the mountains of China.

They are black and white bears. They eat lots and lots of bamboo. Many kinds of pheasants, a kind of bird, live in the mountains too.

Giant pandas are native to China. In the wild they live in a few mountain ranges in Sichuan, Shaanxi and Gansu provinces, in cool bamboo forests. A panda eats about 32 to 45 kilograms of bamboo a day and spends 10 to 16 hours a day finding food and eating it. As few as 1,864 live in the wild.

China's mountains, especially in Tibet and Sichuan, have a huge variety of animals, including many kinds of pheasants. Some animals that died out elsewhere still survive here, such as a small alligator in eastern and central China and a giant salamander in western China.

China's range of relief and vegetation, Britannica explains, has let animals survive there that are extinct elsewhere, among them a small alligator of eastern and central China and a giant salamander in western China, related to the Japanese giant salamander and the American hellbender. Diversity is perhaps greatest in the ranges and valleys of Tibet and Sichuan; the takin and many species of pheasants occur in all of China's mountain ranges.

The giant panda (Ailuropoda melanoleuca) lives in a few mountain ranges of south-central China, in Sichuan, Shaanxi and Gansu; the Smithsonian puts the wild population at as few as 1,864, with about 600 more in zoos and breeding centers. The Sichuan Giant Panda Sanctuaries (inscribed 2006) are the largest remaining contiguous area of panda habitat and also shelter red pandas, snow leopards and clouded leopards among 109 mammal species. The Chinese alligator (Alligator sinensis), critically endangered, lives in slow-moving fresh water of the lower Yangtze and usually grows to about 1.5 m.

About 1.4 billion people live in China.

Many people speak Mandarin Chinese. People in China also speak many other languages. Many people drink tea every day.

About 1.4 billion people live in China. Most belong to the Han group, but about 55 other groups, called minorities, live across around three-fifths of the country. Mandarin, also called Putonghua, meaning 'common language', is the official language, and the written Chinese language is shared across regions where people speak differently.

Tea is part of daily life in homes, workplaces, tea houses and restaurants. China is the world's largest producer of rice and also grows a lot of wheat. In the warm Yangtze valley farmers usually grow two crops a year, but north of the Great Wall only one.

At the end of 2025, NBS counted 1,404.89 million people; 15.9 percent were 65 or older, and the population fell for another year as deaths (11.31 million) outnumbered births (7.92 million). The Han are the largest group and outnumber minorities in every province or autonomous region except Tibet and Xinjiang; some 55 minority groups live across about three-fifths of the land, speaking languages from the Sino-Tibetan, Altaic, Indo-European, Austroasiatic and Tai families. Mandarin (putonghua), based on the Beijing dialect, is the official language. Britannica notes that the government credits itself with raising minorities' living standards and promoting their languages, while some minorities, such as Tibetans, have faced varying degrees of repression.

China has no official religion; Britannica notes that many people practice both Chinese folk religion and Buddhism, which came from India. UNESCO added China's traditional tea processing to its Intangible Cultural Heritage list in 2022: producers make six categories of tea (green, yellow, dark, white, oolong and black), and with scented teas there are more than 2,000 tea products.