Mountain · Nepal, China
Cho Oyu
Cho Oyu is the sixth highest mountain on Earth at 8 188 metres, and its name means Turquoise Goddess in the Tibetan spoken beneath it. Its slopes are gentler than most.
Picture credit: Gozitano (CC BY-SA 4.0) · Steve Hicks (CC BY 2.0) · ambo kangaroo (CC BY-SA 3.0) · Wikimedia Commons
Where is Cho Oyu?
Cho Oyu is part of the Mahalangur Himal, Himalayas.
You will find it in: Nepal, China.
Summit: 28.094° N, 86.661° E
The story behind it
An Austrian team reached the top on 19 October 1954: Herbert Tichy, Sepp Jöchler and Pasang Dawa Lama, all three without bottled oxygen. That made Cho Oyu the highest point anyone had ever reached on their own lungs, and it stayed that way for twenty-four years, until Reinhold Messner and Peter Habeler climbed Everest without oxygen in 1978. A few kilometres west of the summit lies a pass over the ice called the Nangpa La. For centuries it has been the main road between Tibet and the Sherpa valleys of Khumbu, and people still cross it with their yaks. As with several of its neighbours, the exact height is argued about: a survey in 1996 gave 8 188 metres, while an older estimate said 8 201.
Find it on the globe
Cho Oyu is there as a small peak with its own shape — a horn, a ridge, a volcano — standing on the surface. From far away the planet is only a blue ball; detail arrives as you zoom in, and this one appears once you are close enough. Open it on the globe.
It sits at its real coordinates, not near them — the same numbers listed in the facts above. Switch off the layer for this kind of place and it disappears again; the buttons for that are down the right-hand edge.
Questions children ask
How tall is Cho Oyu?
Cho Oyu is 8 188 metres high and the sixth highest mountain in the world. An older estimate put it at 8 201 metres.
Where is Cho Oyu?
Cho Oyu is on the border of Nepal and Tibet, in China, about 20 kilometres west of Mount Everest.
Is Cho Oyu the easiest eight-thousander?
It is often called that, because the usual route up the north-west side is a long snow slope rather than a wall of rock. Easier than the others is still not easy: the air at the top holds about a third of the oxygen it does at the sea.
Where these numbers come from
Every figure on this page was checked against public reference sources before publication. Where sources genuinely disagree, the text says so.
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