Kyrgyzstan 🇰🇬

Kyrgyzstan is a country in Central Asia, one of the 5 entries this site files under that subregion. Its full official name is Kyrgyz Republic. Its seat of government is Bishkek.

The land area is 199,951 km², which ranks it 88th of the 250 countries and territories in this dataset — just behind Belarus and just ahead of Senegal. That makes it a fraction smaller than Belarus.

The population is about 7.2 million, placing it 107th of 250 by population — between Libya above it and Paraguay below. Within Central Asia alone it is the 4th largest of 5 and the 5th most populous.

Kyrgyzstan has no coastline of its own, so every ship-borne import and export crosses somebody else's border first. The good news is that the sea is only one frontier away: China has coastline, which makes it the natural gateway for freight heading to a port.

That geography has practical consequences. Landlocked countries carry higher freight costs than coastal ones because goods change hands, transport mode and jurisdiction more often, and because a neighbour's road, rail or customs problem becomes Kyrgyzstan's problem too. It is also why transit agreements with bordering states, and access to their ports, tend to matter more in Kyrgyzstan's foreign policy than the distance on a map would suggest.

Of the countries on Kyrgyzstan's borders, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan are landlocked as well, so a route in that direction only moves the problem along. The remaining borders are the ones that lead, eventually, to salt water.

Coastal countries on the border:

• 🇨🇳 China

Plotted on a globe it falls at 41.0° north, 75.0° east, which puts it in the northern hemisphere, roughly 4,564 km from the equator, in what geographers would call temperate latitudes.

Follow that same latitude east or west and you reach Türkiye, Spain and Italy — places that share its distance from the equator but little else.

Its land neighbours number 4: China, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan. The largest of them by area is China, which is also the most populous. Together those neighbours hold about 1.48 billion people.

Kyrgyzstan is landlocked. That is true of 45 of the 250 entries here, and it means every shipment in or out has to cross someone else's border first. 3 of its neighbours, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan, are landlocked too. You can see the full picture on the landlocked countries page.

Population divided by land area gives roughly 36 people per square kilometre, which makes it less crowded than the typical entry on this list. Half the entries in this dataset fall below roughly 90 per square kilometre.

The demonym is Kirghiz, so residents are Kirghizs.

Officially it is multilingual, listing Kyrgyz and Russian. Kyrgyz is listed for no other entry in this dataset, which makes it effectively unique to Kyrgyzstan.

Against Asia as a whole it is the 35th most populous of 50 entries, and it accounts for 8.8% of everyone living in Central Asia.

Within Central Asia, Kyrgyzstan is the least populous of the 5 entries listed here, and 4th by area. Turkmenistan is the next step up. Being the smallest of a group is not the same as being small in absolute terms — the subregional context is what gives the figure meaning.

Uzbekistan is the largest of the group by population, and every entry in Central Asia has its own page here if you want to work through the whole neighbourhood rather than one country at a time.

• 🇹🇲 Turkmenistan
• 🇺🇿 Uzbekistan

It uses the Kyrgyzstani som (с, KGS). No other entry in this dataset uses it, so the currency is specific to Kyrgyzstan.

Bishkek is the city to remember for this country.

The top-level domain is .kg. The international dialling code is +996. In ISO terms it is kg in two letters and KGZ in three.

Kyrgyzstan is one of the 193 UN member states in this dataset. The other 57 entries are territories, dependencies or observers, which is why totals on this site run to 250 rather than the familiar 195.

The Kyrgyzstani som (KGS) is used only in Kyrgyzstan among the 250 entries on this site. Its own currency is one of the clearest markers of an economy that sets its own monetary policy rather than importing somebody else's.

Language reaches wider still. Russian is listed for 8 entries here, Kyrgyzstan among them, so a visitor who speaks it can be understood across a large part of the map. Shared language tends to outlive the empires, trade routes and migrations that spread it, which is why the linguistic map and the political one rarely line up.