← Daily Dose · Maps‹›Half of Humanity Fits in One Circle · Daily Dose · Maps No. 004
Daily Dose · Maps/Aug 27, 2026/Population & Density
Half of Humanity Fits in One Circle
Draw a circle 3,386 kilometres in radius around a point in the mountains of north-west Yunnan. Inside it: more people than in the entire rest of the world. The circle covers less than a fifteenth of Earth’s surface, and roughly half of what it does cover is open ocean, desert and ice. This is the single most efficient way to enclose humanity — and it is quietly getting harder to draw.
3,386 km
Radius of the smallest circle that can be drawn on the globe containing half of the world’s people. Centred at 28.375° N, 100.625° E — the mountains above the upper Yangtze, Yunnan, China. Arthur, Geographical Analysis, 2024.
The Valeriepieris circle, drawn on an azimuthal equidistant projection centred on the circle itself — so the circle is a true circle and every distance from the centre is to scale. Solid rim: the 3,386 km circle holding half of humanity. Dashed rim: Alasdair Rae’s 4,000 km “Yuxi circle” (55%). Shading is schematic, not gridded data; all place names, coordinates and distances are real.
01 · Provenance
It started as a Reddit post
In 2013 an English teacher posting as valeriepieris drew a rough box over East and South Asia and claimed it held more people than everywhere else combined. He was right. Two rounds of proper mathematics since have shrunk the shape and made it a real circle on a real sphere — and barely moved the answer.
Myers 20134,000 km
Quah 20153,300 km
Arthur 20233,386 km
Quah’s and Arthur’s circles differ by 86 km — about 2.5% — and by roughly 800 km in where they put the centre. They used different population grids and different resolutions; the agreement, not the gap, is the striking part.
To scale
All three circles drawn to the same scale. The claim has survived every attempt to tighten it.
02 · The measurement
Half the world, sorted by distance
The circle behaves like a median: half the data inside, half outside. Walk outward from the centre in Yunnan and you cross the great population masses in order — the Red River, Bengal, the North China Plain, the Ganges, the Deccan. By 3,386 km you have counted four billion people and the counting stops.
Great-circle distance from 28.375° N, 100.625° E to each city centre, computed for this edition on a sphere of radius 6,371 km. Gradient encodes distance outward from the centre, light to dark.
6.9%of Earth’s surface — 35.2 million km² — is enclosed by the circle (computed)
4.2 bnpeople estimated inside the 3,300 km version in 2022, out of 8 billion (estimate)
55%of the world lives within 4,000 km of Yuxi, Yunnan — 4.32 bn (Rae, 2022)
03 · Why there
Two countries do most of the work
The circle is not centred on the world’s biggest city or its busiest region. It sits between India and China because that is the only point from which both fit inside the same reach. Together those two countries hold 2.86 billion people — 35% of humanity — and they are 2,285 km and 591 km from the centre respectively.
India1,438.1 M
China1,422.6 M
Indonesia281.2 M
Bangladesh171.5 M
Philippines114.9 M
Vietnam100.4 M
2023 population, millions. UN World Population Prospects 2024 via Our World in Data. Hatched = country only partly inside the circle.
InsidePartly insideOutside
For comparison
The four largest countries entirely outside the circle, added together, come to 926 million — less than two-thirds of India alone.
United States343.5 M
Nigeria227.9 M
Brazil211.1 M
Russia143.8 M
Same scale as the inside-the-circle chart. Russia’s population is counted in full here; the circle does clip its southern Siberian fringe near Novosibirsk.
04 · Four centres
Where the middle of the world is depends on how you ask
There is no single “centre of population.” Ask for the average position and you land in an empty quarter of Saudi Arabia. Ask for the point minimising total travel and you land in Rajasthan. Ask for the smallest circle holding half of everyone and you land in Yunnan, 4,968 km east of the first answer. All four are plotted on the hero map above as hollow rings.
Mean centre4,968 km
3-D centre3,276 km
Geom. median2,860 km
VP centre0 km
Distance of each candidate “centre of the world’s population” from the VP centre, computed for this edition from the coordinates in Arthur (2024), Table 1. The mean centre falls in the Rub’ al Khali; the 3-D centre in northern Afghanistan; the geometric median in Rajasthan.
The same ruler, other places
A VP radius is a portable measure of how tightly a population clusters. Mongolia’s collapsed from 227 km to 34 km in twenty years as herders moved to Ulaanbaatar. America’s grew.
Iceland15 km
Mongolia 202034 km
Great Britain132 km
Mongolia 2000227 km
US lower 48949 km
The world3,386 km
Log scale. VP radius = radius of the smallest circle holding half of that territory’s people. Source: Arthur (2024), SEDAC 2020 grid.
05 · The rim
Osaka makes it by 24 kilometres
The most interesting thing about a threshold is who sits on it. Osaka clears the rim by about 24 km and Karachi by about 32 — a rounding error at planetary scale. Tokyo, 356 km further out, does not make it, which means the world’s largest metropolitan area is outside the circle that contains half the world.
Illustrative: great-circle distances to city-centre points, computed for this edition. Margins of a few tens of kilometres are sensitive to which point in a metro area you pick — the ordering is robust, the exact kilometres are not. Filled dots inside the rim, hollow dots outside.
06 · Drift
The circle has to grow from here
Asia’s share of humanity peaked in 2000 at 60.7% and has been falling ever since. Africa’s has doubled since 1950. The Valeriepieris circle exists because population is concentrated; as growth shifts to a continent 8,000 km away, the smallest circle holding half of us must widen and the centre must drift west.
Asia’s share of world populationAfrica’s share
UN DESA, World Population Prospects 2024, via Our World in Data. Values at 1950–2020 by decade plus 2023.
60.7% → 59.0%Asia’s share of world population, 2000 to 2023 — the first sustained fall on record
9.1% → 18.3%Africa’s share, 1950 to 2023. It has doubled while Asia’s barely moved
10.3 bnprojected world population at its peak in the mid-2080s, from 8.2 billion in 2024 (UN, 2024)
Why it matters · what to notice on the map
A circle is an argument about scale
The Valeriepieris circle is a party trick that turns into a planning document. Half of the world’s customers, voters, carbon emissions, monsoon-dependent farmers and coastal flood risk sit inside one shape you can cross in a day’s flying. It is also a warning about averages: the same population, asked four slightly different questions, produced four centres in four countries.
The circle is mostly empty — Tibet, the Taklamakan, the Gobi, the South China Sea and the Bay of Bengal all sit inside it. The density is doing the work, not the area.
Its centre is in mountains, not in a metropolis. The point that balances India against China happens to be one of the emptiest places in either.
Japan straddles the rim: Osaka in, Tokyo out. Indonesia mostly misses it — Java, one of the densest large islands on Earth, lies beyond the edge.
The three hollow rings to the west are the other centres of world population. They disagree with the VP centre by up to 4,968 km.
The circle covers 6.9% of Earth’s surface. The remaining 93.1% holds the other half of us.
Sources & notes
Rudy Arthur, “Valeriepieris Circles for Spatial Data Analysis,” Geographical Analysis (2024); preprint arXiv:2307.16728 (2023).VP circle radius 3,386 km; centre 28.375°N, 100.625°E; mean centre, 3-D centre and geometric median coordinates; Bachi standard distance 6,583 km; VP radii for Great Britain, Mongolia, the continental US and Iceland. Computed on SEDAC gridded population data.
Ken Myers (u/valeriepieris), Reddit, 2013; summarised by Wikipedia, “Valeriepieris circle,” and Brilliant Maps.Original claim: a circle of roughly 4,000 km radius covering about 10% of Earth’s surface holds more than half its people.
Danny Quah, “The world’s tightest cluster of people,” LSE Maths blog, December 2015.A 3,300 km great-circle radius centred near Mong Khet, Myanmar, derived by optimisation on 100 km-resolution population data.
Alasdair Rae, “The Yuxi Circle,” Stats, Maps n Pix, February 2022.4,000 km buffer around Yuxi, Yunnan holds 4.32 billion people — just over 55% of a 7.8 billion world. 1,500+ cities tested; 148 circles exceeded 4 billion. WorldPop 2020 1 km gridded data, geodesic buffers.
UN DESA, World Population Prospects 2024, via Our World in Data.2023 national populations (India 1.438 bn, China 1.423 bn, world 8.092 bn); Asia’s share of world population 54.9% in 1950, peaking at 60.7% in 2000 and 59.0% in 2023; Africa 9.1% → 18.3%. World population 8.2 billion in 2024, projected to peak near 10.3 billion in the mid-2080s.
Estimate reported in 2022 (R. Shah) using UN World Population Prospects, cited in Wikipedia, “Valeriepieris circle.”About 4.2 billion people inside the 3,300 km circle as of 2022, out of 8 billion. Flagged: an independent estimate, not an official statistic.
Geodesic distances and circle areas computed for this edition.Illustrative: great-circle distances from 28.375°N, 100.625°E on a sphere of radius 6,371 km, and spherical-cap area 35.2 million km² = 6.9% of Earth’s 510 million km² surface. City coordinates are city-centre points; margins of a few kilometres are within the noise of that choice.
The map is schematic: coastlines are heavily simplified and population shading is drawn by hand to indicate where the mass is, not to represent gridded data. Every place name, coordinate, radius and distance shown is real. Figures marked illustrative or estimate above are exactly that.