🇹🇼 Taiwan

Where is Taiwan?

Taiwan lies in Eastern Asia, on the continent of Asia.

It sits in the northern half of the world, roughly 2 616 km from the equator.

It has no land neighbours — every border it has is with the sea.

How big is Taiwan?

Taiwan covers 36 193 square kilometres.

That is about 14 times the size of Luxembourg.

Who lives in Taiwan?

People here speak Chinese.

They pay with the New Taiwan dollar ($).

The land of Taiwan

It lies between the tropics and the poles, which is the single biggest reason its weather is the way it is.

What makes Taiwan different?

Websites from here often end in .tw.

Taiwan and the rest of the world

It takes up about 0.03 % of all the land that countries stand on.

A country, or a territory?

Taiwan 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.