Tajikistan 🇹🇯

Tajikistan lies in Central Asia, part of Asia. Treaties and official documents call it Republic of Tajikistan. Its seat of government is Dushanbe.

It covers 143,100 km², which ranks it 97th of the 250 countries and territories in this dataset — just behind Nepal and just ahead of Greece. For scale, it is almost exactly the same size as Nepal.

It is home to roughly 10.6 million people, placing it 91st of 250 by population — between Portugal above it and Papua New Guinea below. Within Central Asia alone it is the 5th largest of 5 and the 3rd most populous.

Tajikistan 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 Tajikistan's problem too. It is also why transit agreements with bordering states, and access to their ports, tend to matter more in Tajikistan's foreign policy than the distance on a map would suggest.

Of the countries on Tajikistan's borders, Afghanistan, Kyrgyzstan 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 39.0° north, 71.0° east, which puts it in the northern hemisphere, roughly 4,341 km from the equator, in what geographers would call temperate latitudes.

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

4 countries share a land border with it: Afghanistan, China, Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan. The largest of them by area is China, which is also the most populous. Together those neighbours hold about 1.50 billion people.

This is one of the world's landlocked countries. That is true of 45 of the 250 entries here, which reliably raises the cost of trade, because port access depends on a transit agreement with a neighbour. 3 of its neighbours, Afghanistan, Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan, are landlocked too. You can see the full picture on the landlocked countries page.

Density comes out at around 74 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.

People from Tajikistan are called Tadzhiks.

Officially it is multilingual, listing Russian and Tajik. Tajik is listed for no other entry in this dataset, which makes it effectively unique to Tajikistan. Russian, the first listed, is shared with 7 other entries worldwide.

Against Asia as a whole it is the 29th most populous of 50 entries, and it accounts for 13% of everyone living in Central Asia.

Zoom in from the world to Central Asia and Tajikistan sits 3rd of 5 by population and 5th by area. Its immediate company in that ordering is Kazakhstan just above and Turkmenistan just below, which is a more honest comparison set than a global league table.

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.

• 🇰🇿 Kazakhstan
• 🇹🇲 Turkmenistan
• 🇺🇿 Uzbekistan

It uses the Tajikistani somoni (ЅМ, TJS). No other entry in this dataset uses it, so the currency is specific to Tajikistan.

The top-level domain is .tj. To phone it from abroad you dial +992. Its ISO codes are tj and TJK, which is what most databases and flag files use.

Dushanbe is the city to remember for this country.

It holds a seat at the United Nations, one of 193 entries here that do. 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 Tajikistani somoni (TJS) is used only in Tajikistan 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, Tajikistan 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.