Asia holds the world’s largest lake (the Caspian Sea), its deepest (Baikal), and the largest lake entirely within the Arctic Circle (Taymyr). The Caspian alone covers more surface area than every other Asian lake combined; Lake Baikal in second place is less than a tenth its size; and Lake Balkhash in third is half the size of Baikal again. After those three, the sizes drop into a fairly tight cluster between roughly 3,500 and 7,000 km², which is where most of this list sits.
Two caveats apply to any ranking of Asian lakes. First, several entries vary substantially in area from one season to the next or one year to the next. Cambodia’s Tonlé Sap, for example, expands to 10,360 km² at monsoon peak and contracts to 2,700 km² in the dry season; by average area it would rank fourth, but it is conventionally excluded from lake rankings on the grounds that it is functionally a floodplain. Second, the Aral Sea, once the world’s fourth-largest lake at 68,000 km², has been fragmenting since the 1960s and no longer exists as a single body of water; the two surviving remnants together would still be top-tier by size. The list below uses long-term reference areas. The table at the end gives a wider top-30 view with notes on seasonal and shrinking entries.
1. Caspian Sea
The Caspian Sea is the largest lake in the world by surface area, with a long-term reference figure of around 386,400 km² and current measurements between 371,000 and 389,000 km², depending on the year and the source. Sea level has been falling for most of the past two decades. The Caspian sits in an endorheic basin between Europe and Asia, with five littoral states: Kazakhstan to the north and east, Russia to the north and west, Azerbaijan to the southwest, Iran to the south, and Turkmenistan along the southern part of the east coast. It is geologically a small ocean rather than a true lake, since its basin is a fragment of the ancient Tethys Sea and lies partly on oceanic crust.
The Caspian is about 1,200 km long, 320 km wide on average, and reaches a maximum depth of 1,025 m in its southern basin. Total water volume is roughly 78,200 km³. Salinity averages about 1.2 percent (roughly a third of ocean water), with substantial regional variation: the northern shelves near the Volga mouth are nearly fresh, while the bays along the eastern shore can exceed 30 percent. The Volga supplies about 80 percent of the inflow, with the Ural, Kura, Terek, and Sefīd-Rūd rivers contributing most of the rest.
The Caspian basin is the source of about 90 percent of the world’s caviar, produced from six native sturgeon species: beluga, Russian, Persian, bastard, sterlet, and starry. Overfishing and dam construction have pushed all six toward collapse, and several are now subject to international export bans. The basin also contains substantial oil and gas reserves, particularly off the Azerbaijani and Kazakh coasts, which have been exploited commercially since the 1870s.
2. Lake Baikal
Lake Baikal covers 31,722 km² in southern Siberia, between the Russian republic of Buryatia and Irkutsk Oblast. It is the world’s seventh-largest lake by area but its first by volume: with 23,615 km³ of water it holds more than the entire North American Great Lakes system combined, and roughly 23 percent of the world’s surface fresh water. It is also the deepest lake on the planet, with a maximum depth of 1,642 m and an average depth of 744 m. The basin formed as a continental rift roughly 25 to 30 million years ago and is still widening at about 2 cm per year, which makes Baikal one of the oldest lakes in the world as well.
The lake is fed by more than 330 inflows, the largest of which are the Selenga, Upper Angara, Barguzin, Turka, and Snezhnaya rivers. Its only outflow is the Angara, which leaves the lake’s western shore near Listvyanka and joins the Yenisei more than 1,700 km later. Baikal hosts more than 2,500 documented plant and animal species, of which roughly 80 percent are found nowhere else, including the Baikal seal (nerpa), the only exclusively freshwater seal in the world. Several endemic fish species, including the translucent golomyanka, live at extreme depth. UNESCO inscribed Lake Baikal as a World Heritage Site in 1996.
3. Lake Balkhash
Lake Balkhash covers 16,400 km² in southeastern Kazakhstan and is one of the more unusual lakes in the world: its two halves have completely different chemistry. The western basin is fresh, fed primarily by the Ili River, which delivers roughly 75 percent of the lake’s total inflow. The eastern basin is brackish to saline, fed by smaller streams (the Karatal, Aksu, and Lepsy) and connected to the western basin only through the narrow Saryesik Strait, which is about 4 km across at its narrowest point. The lake is shallow throughout, with a maximum depth of 26 m and an average of less than 6 m.
Balkhash has been shrinking since the 1970s. Most of the loss has come from upstream dam construction and irrigation withdrawal on the Ili in both Kazakhstan and the Xinjiang region of China, where the river rises. The shoreline has retreated by several hundred meters in places, and salinity in the eastern basin has been rising as inflows fall. The lake supports commercial fisheries for pike, perch, marinka, and Ili catfish, and the small city of Balqash on the northern shore (population around 65,000) takes its name from it.
4. Lake Taymyr
Lake Taymyr sits on the Taymyr Peninsula in north-central Siberia, south of the Byrranga Mountains and well inside the Arctic Circle at roughly 74° N. Its reference area is around 4,560 km², but it can swell to nearly 6,990 km² during peak spring snowmelt, which is the figure used here for ranking and the one most commonly cited in older literature. The lake is irregular in shape, with a length of about 165 km, a maximum width of 23 km, and a maximum depth of only 26 m. The Upper Taymyra is the main inflow; the Lower Taymyra is the outflow, draining northward into the Kara Sea.
Taymyr is the largest lake entirely within the Arctic Circle and is frozen for roughly nine months out of every twelve, typically from September through June. The cold water supports a limited but commercially significant fish community, including muksun, sig (peled whitefish), and char. The lake also carries a measurable load of caesium-137 and other radionuclides from atmospheric nuclear tests conducted at the Novaya Zemlya range during the Cold War, deposited primarily through snowfall and runoff during the 1950s and 1960s.
5. Issyk-Kul Lake
Issyk-Kul covers 6,236 km² in northeastern Kyrgyzstan, between the Küngöy Ala-Too range to the north and the Teskey Ala-Too to the south, at an elevation of 1,607 m. It is the world’s second-largest mountain lake by area (after Titicaca in Peru and Bolivia), the world’s second-deepest saline lake (after the Caspian), and the seventh-deepest lake of any kind, with a maximum depth of 668 m. Its name translates as “warm lake” in Kyrgyz, a reference to the fact that it never freezes despite its altitude. Mild salinity (around 0.6 percent) and geothermal heat from springs along the lake bed keep the surface above freezing year-round.
About 118 rivers and streams flow into Issyk-Kul, but the basin is endorheic, with no surface outflow. Water leaves only through evaporation and groundwater seepage, and the level has fluctuated by several meters over the past century. The lake supports a small commercial fishery and several endemic and threatened fish species, including Schmidt’s dace, the Issyk-Kul marinka, and the naked osman. The shoreline and surrounding wetlands are part of the Issyk-Kul Biosphere Reserve, designated by UNESCO in 2001, and the lake itself is listed under the Ramsar Convention.
6. Lake Urmia
Lake Urmia, in northwestern Iran between the provinces of East and West Azerbaijan, is included here at its long-term reference area of about 5,200 km². That figure is now historical. The lake has been shrinking since the mid-1990s, and current measurements are a small fraction of the reference number. In November 2024 the Iranian Energy Ministry reported a surface area of 930 km²; by August 2025 the country’s Department of Environment confirmed that Urmia had dropped to 581 km², with a volume of around half a billion cubic meters, down from roughly 32 billion cubic meters in 1995. Officials have described the lake as having reached “a point of no return.”
The collapse has multiple causes. Around 60 dams have been built on the rivers feeding the lake, and irrigated agriculture has expanded from 480,000 hectares in 2012 to more than 530,000 hectares despite a national restoration program launched in 2013. Rainfall has declined and temperatures have risen across the basin. Urmia is an endorheic saline lake (originally about 1.5 times as salty as ocean water), and the receding shoreline has exposed roughly 5,000 km² of salt flats that contribute to dust storms, soil salinization, and respiratory illness in surrounding settlements. The lake is a UNESCO Biosphere Reserve and a Ramsar site, and it still hosts seasonal populations of greater flamingos, white pelicans, and several gull species on the remaining 102 small islands.
7. Qinghai Lake
Qinghai Lake is the largest lake in China, covering between 4,489 and 4,543 km² depending on the year. It sits on the northeastern Tibetan Plateau at an elevation of 3,205 m and gives its name to the surrounding province. The lake is saline and slightly alkaline, with salinity around 1.4 percent. Maximum depth is 32.8 m. The basin is endorheic and is fed by more than 23 rivers and streams; the largest inflow is the Buha River from the west, which delivers roughly half of the total annual water budget. Qinghai’s level fell steadily through the late twentieth century but has been rising since around 2004, an unusual reversal attributed to increased glacial melt and precipitation across the upper Yangtze and Yellow river watersheds.
The lake hosts two endemic fish species, the naked carp (Gymnocypris przewalskii) and a stone loach, as well as several stopover sites for migratory birds. Bird Island, on the western shore, is one of the most important breeding grounds in central Asia for bar-headed geese, brown-headed gulls, and great cormorants. The bar-headed goose population at Qinghai is famous for crossing the Himalayas at altitudes above 6,000 m on its way to and from the Indian subcontinent.
8. Lake Khanka
Lake Khanka straddles the border between Russia’s Primorsky Krai and China’s Heilongjiang Province in the Russian Far East. It covers 4,190 km² and is roughly pear-shaped, about 90 km long and 45 km wide at its widest. The lake is unusually shallow for its size, with a maximum depth of only 10.6 m and an average depth of 4.5 m. Approximately 24 rivers and streams flow in, while a single outlet, the Songacha River, drains the lake northward into the Ussuri and ultimately the Amur, which empties into the Sea of Okhotsk.
Khanka is one of the richest waterbird sites in eastern Asia. More than 350 bird species have been recorded around the lake, including breeding populations of red-crowned crane, white-naped crane, oriental stork, and Eurasian spoonbill. The lake and surrounding wetlands are protected on both sides of the border, by Russia’s Khankaysky Nature Reserve and China’s Xingkai Lake National Nature Reserve, and the area has been a Ramsar wetland of international importance since 1971.
9. Sarygamysh Lake
Sarygamysh Lake covers 3,955 km² straddling the border between northern Turkmenistan and northwestern Uzbekistan, in the Kyzylkum and Karakum desert lowlands roughly midway between the Caspian and the former Aral Sea. The lake is about 125 km long and reaches a maximum depth of 40 m. Until the seventeenth century the basin was fed primarily by the Uzboy River, an outflow of the Amu Darya that disappeared when the parent river shifted its course. Today the lake receives water almost entirely from irrigation runoff drained off the cotton fields of the lower Amu Darya through the Daryalyk collector.
That changed water source has had two effects. First, the lake has actually grown substantially since the 1970s, in contrast to the simultaneous collapse of the Aral Sea downstream. Second, because the inflow consists of agricultural runoff, the water carries heavy concentrations of pesticides, herbicides, and fertilizer residues, along with elevated levels of heavy metals leached from the surrounding desert soils. Salinity is high and rising. The lake’s ecosystem is severely degraded, although it still supports several fish species (including pike-perch and bream) that were introduced for commercial fishing during the Soviet era.
10. Van Lake
Lake Van covers 3,755 km² in the eastern Anatolian highlands, between Turkey’s Van and Bitlis provinces. It is the largest lake in the Middle East and the third-deepest saline lake in the world, with a maximum depth of 451 m and an average depth of 171 m. The lake formed roughly 600,000 years ago when an eruption of the Nemrut volcano dammed an outlet on its western shore, leaving the basin endorheic. Several small streams (the Karasu, Bendimahi, Hosap, and Zilan) flow in; nothing flows out. With evaporation rates higher than inflow, the water has concentrated to around 2.3 percent salinity and a strongly alkaline pH of about 9.7, making it one of the largest soda lakes in the world.
That chemistry sharply limits the lake’s biology. The only fish species native to Van’s open water is the pearl mullet (Alburnus tarichi), which migrates each spring up the freshwater inflows to spawn, in numbers large enough to be commercially harvested. The lake contains four inhabited islands, the largest of which is Akdamar; the tenth-century Armenian Cathedral of the Holy Cross still stands on it and remains the best-preserved example of medieval Armenian church architecture in the region. The Van cat, a domesticated breed with distinctive odd-colored eyes and a swimming habit, originates from the surrounding region.
