Asian City Name Generator

Asia is not one naming tradition but dozens, and the quickest way to make a fictional city feel rooted is to borrow the building blocks of a specific one. Japanese place names stack nature words — kawa (river), yama (mountain), hama (beach), mori (forest), saki (cape) — into names like Kawashiro or Shirahama. Chinese cities are usually two characters in pinyin, often a virtue or element plus a landform: Lingzhou, Qingfeng, Yunhai. Korean names tend to end in -san, -cheon, -po, -ju or -hae, as in Cheongsan or Seolju. Vietnamese and Thai names are two or three separate words (Thanh Hà, Nakhon Phirom), while Malay and Indonesian towns lead with a geographic word such as Kuala, Sungai, Bukit or Kota.

South and Inner Asia add more shapes: Indian cities ending in -pur, -garh, -nagar, -kot or -puram (Ratnagarh, Meghapuram), Mongolian names built from colours and landforms (Altan Khot, Tsagaan Nuur), and Tibetan or Bhutanese places ending in -ling, -dzong or -gang.

This list mixes all of those with translated epithets — Jade Harbor, Lotus Gate, City of Nine Bridges — for settings that want the flavour without the transliteration. Pick one register per region of your map so neighbouring cities sound like they share a language.