From devotion to rebellion, AP photos recorded Asia’s many tones in 2025

A continent as large as Asia rarely speaks in a single tone.

Its 2025 played out in polyphony — with chords of devotion, chaos, spectacle and fatigue — each a reminder of how much can, and does, coexist.

AP photographs, taken from the Himalayas to the Java Sea, recorded all of them.

Some moments are quiet.

From above, the Rohingya refugee camps at Bangladesh’s Cox’s Bazar appear as calm, tidy rows — a quiet geometry that masks the dirge of a people in exile. In the Indonesian capital of Jakarta, a dove settles on a soldier’s hat during an independence day ceremony. Bright red powder drifts like a quiet fog as a girl celebrates the Hindu festival of Holi in Mumbai, India.

Vibrant motion cut through elsewhere.

Traditional dancers in West Java, Indonesia, prepare to head out, a bright dragon head framed in the doorway. Migratory birds swirl above the Yamuna River as people in a boat scatter feed across the Indian river dawn. A humanoid robot pounds down a racetrack in Beijing, one of many chrome and circuitry competitors chasing the 1,500-meter finish.

In politics, ceremony and upheaval rang out.

Lawmakers in Tokyo applaud Japan’s first female prime minister. A young woman in Seoul, South Korea, waits through the night near the Constitutional Court, waiting to hear if a president would fall after declaring martial law. In Kathmandu, Nepal, a protester roars against corruption, clutching a captured police shield as if willing the world to change.

And woven into the year were the harsh notes of disasters.

In Bangkok, a high rise that collapsed after a major earthquake in Myanmar looms over rescuers moving in a thin line below. In Ahmedabad, India, a woman wails at a the funeral of a plane crash, her grieving body held upright only by the hands of those gathering to steady her. In Hong Kong, two grey-haired men stand shoulder to shoulder, watching in horror as a Hong Kong high-rise burns against the night sky.

Laborers huddle together under a police barricade in Delhi and sipped tea while sheltering from rain. A couple share a wedding kiss in a Filipino church inundated with floodwaters.

Together, they showed how life persisted despite it all, quietly stitching itself back together, frame by frame.

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This gallery was curated by AP photo editors:

Yirmiyan Arthur

Courtney Dittmar

Text:

Aniruddha Ghosal