Country · Asia
Macau
Macao Special Administrative Region of the People's Republic of China
Macau is a country in Eastern Asia. About 632 thousand people live there, in an area of 30 square kilometres.
Picture credit: Charlie fong (CC BY-SA 4.0) · calvinstkm (CC BY-SA 3.0) · Nelson Pérez (CC BY-SA 3.0) · Wikimedia Commons
Where is Macau?
Macau lies in Eastern Asia, on the continent of Asia.
It sits in the northern half of the world, roughly 2 468 km from the equator.
It shares a border with 1 country: China.
How big is Macau?
Macau covers 30 square kilometres.
Luxembourg is about 86 times bigger.
Spread out evenly, that is roughly 21 054.5 people per square kilometre.
Who lives in Macau?
About 632 thousand people live in Macau.
People here speak Portuguese and Chinese.
They pay with the Macanese pataca (P).
On average, people born here can expect to live about 82 years.
The land of Macau
It lies inside the tropics, which is the single biggest reason its weather is the way it is.
What makes Macau different?
Websites from here often end in .mo.
Macau and the rest of the world
Out of every thousand people alive on Earth, about 0.1 live in Macau.
It takes up about 0 % of all the land that countries stand on.
That is busier than the world average of roughly 60 people per square kilometre.
Macau and its neighbours
China, its largest neighbour, is about 323 565.4 times bigger.
China has more people: 1.4 billion against 632 thousand.
A country, or a territory?
Macau is not an independent country but a territory. It has its own name, its own borders and often its own laws, but another country speaks for it abroad — it holds no seat of its own at the United Nations, for instance.
That is more common than it sounds. There are dozens of such places around the world: some sit far from the country they belong to, some right beside it. A few govern themselves almost completely and hand over only defence and foreign policy; others are held more closely. How much a territory decides for itself is settled case by case, never by one rule.
On this site territories get a page of their own, because children look them up and because other pages link to them. They are left out of the record lists, though: those rank only members of the United Nations, so that a ranking never mixes countries with places belonging to somebody else.
Its nearest neighbour by land is China.
Questions children ask
How many people live in Macau?
About 632 thousand people live in Macau. (Source: World Bank, 2018.)
Which countries border Macau?
Macau borders China — 1 neighbour in total.
How big is Macau?
Macau covers 30 square kilometres. Luxembourg is about 86 times bigger.
Which continent is Macau in?
Macau is in Asia, in the part called Eastern Asia.
Where these numbers come from
Borders and outlines: Natural Earth. Names, capitals, areas, languages and currencies: ISO 3166 data (world-countries). Population: World Bank, 2018. Every derived figure on this page (ranks, density, distance from the equator) is calculated from those values.
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