Country · Asia
Macau
Macao Special Administrative Region of the People's Republic of China
Macau is a territory in Eastern Asia. About 632 000 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 everybody out evenly and you get about 21 054.5 people on every square kilometre.
That is busier than the world average of roughly 60 people per square kilometre.
Who lives in Macau?
About 632 000 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 one lives in Macau.
It takes up less than a hundredth of one per cent of all the land in the world.
Macau and its neighbours
China is thousands of times that size.
China has more people: 1.4 billion against 632 000.
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.
How big is Macau compared with the United States?
- The United States is about 312 420 times as big as Macau: 9 372 610 km² against 30 km².
- The United Kingdom is about 8 097 times as big as Macau: 242 900 km² against 30 km².
Questions children ask
How many people live in Macau?
About 632 000 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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