What are the Geographical Limits of Asia?

In defining the limits of Asia one runs into a geographical problem. What and where is Asia. What are its boundaries? Is the gi­gantic landmass of Eurasia one continent or two? The problem is further com­pounded by the fact that Europe blends imperceptibly into Asia, with Russia sprawling between them cutting across tra­ditional North-South trending Europe- Asia boundary along the Ural Mountains.

This, the so-called traditional continental boundary does not, however, follow the crest of the Ural Mountains. At the south­ern end of the Urals, this arbitrarily defined boundary is even less convincing. It follows the Ural River and the northern side of the Caucasus Mountains to the Black Sea and thence to the Mediterranean Sea.

The name ‘Asia’ is very ancient. The Greeks used it to designate all the lands lo­cated to the east of their homeland. It is believed that the name may have been de­rived from the Assyrian word asu (meaning the “sunrise”) applied to Turkey and the lands to the east of it; whereas ereb (“sunset”) referred to Greece and areas to the west of it.

The terms “Asia” and “Europe” thus had their origins as histori­cal expressions, and the boundary between Europe and Asia a historical-cultural con­cept. More recently, the division of Eurasia, largest of the continents, into Europe and Asia derives from the arbitrary decisions made by peoples in the western part of the peninsula of Europe.

Even accepting the limits of Asia along the Urals, one faces the problem of what should be included in this book. Should we include everything east of the Urals in our study? Russia, sprawls over the tradi­tional Europe-Asia boundary, and thus spills over both Asia and Europe. Russia was developed and Europeanized into a vast European Empire by the central authority in Moscow, and thus remained culturally quite distinct from the rest of the Asian continent.

It is, therefore, ex­cluded from our discussion. The Central Asian Republics (of the former USSR or the Soviet Union) are clearly Asian in out­look, historical connections, and cultural associations. It is certainly most reasonable to include them into our discussion.

To a smaller extent, the problem of definition involves a tiny portion of Tur­key and the island of Cyprus. The Ural boundary between Asia and Europe passes from the Black Sea to the Mediterranean Sea along the straits of Bosporus, the Sea of Marmara, and the Dardanelles, leaving a small portion of Turkey in the European shore, where the great city of Istanbul is located. Istanbul and the island of Cyprus which lies to the south of Turkey both had Asian and European links but have suffi­cient Asian character as to qualify for their inclusion in our discussion.

With the limits thus defined, Asia forms a huge quadrangle covering an area of little over 17 million sq. miles (44 mil­lion sq. km); north-to-south extensions range from latitudes 85°N to beyond 10°S, and the west to east dimensions from 25°E (western margin of Turkey) to 170°’W (the Bering Strait), almost halfway around the world.

To the north lies the Arctic Ocean; to the northwest the plains of northern Europe, to the west the Red Sea and be­yond that the Mediterranean Sea; to the south, the Indian Ocean, into which pro­jects the peninsula of the Indian subcontinent; and to the southeast the pen­insulas and the archipelagoes of Malaysia and Indonesia, separating Asia from Aus­tralia by the mingled waters of the Indian and Pacific Oceans.

In the east lies the Pa­cific littoral broken into various seas, like the Bering Sea, the Sea of Okhotsk, the Sea of Japan, the North China Sea, and the South China Sea. Further east, off the Asian mainland, lie the chains of island groups including those of Japan, Taiwan, and the Philippines.

Asia’s coastlines are short for its huge size; nearly one-fifth of which remains mostly frozen and com­mercially useless in the Arctic Ocean. Asia is not one, but many; several of its broad divisions or realms contain a group of countries that share broad simi­larities in their physical and cultural character, and in historical and political de­velopment.

Such realms may be conven­iently recognized:

(1) Russia, the largest in area covering the entire span of northern part of the Asiatic continent;

(2) East Asia which includes China, Japan, Taiwan, North Korea and South Korea;

(3) South­east Asia comprising countries that lie between India and China, as well as the various island groups that form the coun­tries of Indonesia and the Philippines;

(4) South Asia comprising the Indian subcon­tinent, that includes India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal, Bhutan, the islands of Sri Lanka and the Maldives;

(5) Southwest Asia or the so-called Middle East which in­cludes several Arab nations, Israel, Turkey, Iran, and Afghanistan; and

(6) Central Asia that comprises the Central Asian Republics of the former USSR, namely, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan.

In addition, world’s larg­est nation—Russia—lies within the territorial limits and spanning the entire northern part of the Asiatic continent, but is distinctly European in its cultural orien­tation and historical evolution, and thus excluded from this study.