Every Embassy in the World

Every country keeps a small piece of itself in other people's capitals. An embassy is a strange object: a few buildings in a foreign city, staffed by people who represent a state that may be thousands of kilometres away, and protected by rules most of the world agreed in Vienna in 1961. Put them all on one map and you get a picture of how states see each other: who bothers to be present, who shares a building, who is never in the same room.

I built that map from open data. OpenStreetMap contributors have mapped 17,573 diplomatic buildings; Wikidata lists thousands of embassies by sending and receiving state. After cleaning, merging and checking, the gazetteer holds 15,584 current missions: 8,917 embassies, 406 high commissions (the embassies Commonwealth members send each other), 92 apostolic nunciatures of the Holy See, 1,857 consulates-general, 1,528 other consulates, 1,867 honorary consulates, 352 permanent missions to international organisations and 239 representative and liaison offices. A further 1,191 missions known to Wikidata have no location, so they count in the country totals but are not dots on the map.

01 · The mapEvery mission, every network

Zoom in and the clusters break into individual missions, coloured by type; tap one for its details. Choose a country, by searching or by clicking it, to draw its network abroad from its capital, or switch to see who is present in its own capital. The layers button (top right of the map) changes the base map and turns labels, borders, mission types and lines on and off.

02 · The biggest networksWho is everywhere

Counting embassy-level missions (embassies, high commissions, nunciatures and the European Union's delegations), China is present in more states than anyone, 178, followed by United States (168), France (166), United Kingdom (160) and Japan (159). Counting every post, consulates and permanent missions included but not honorary consuls, United States comes first with 279, ahead of China (258).

Those totals can be checked. The Lowy Institute's Global Diplomacy Index counts posts the same way for 66 countries; its 2024 edition put China first with 274 and the United States second with 271. For the seven countries whose totals Lowy published in its key findings, this map finds between 85% and 105% of Lowy's number. That is reassuring for the big networks, and a reminder that the open data are a few years and a few closures out of step.

Honorary consuls, local citizens who look after another country's people and trade part time, are a different game. Czechia has the most mapped, 146, then Germany with 135; but honorary consulates are mapped very unevenly, so treat these as the best-mapped, not the biggest.

03 · CapitalsWhere the embassies are

Washington, D.C. hosts 181 embassies, the most of any city. Brussels is close behind with 178, partly because many states fold their embassy to Belgium into the same building as their mission to the European Union, then Paris and London (170 each) and Berlin (168). Rome has 150 embassies to Italy, and on top of them the 74 mapped embassies to the Holy See, which has no room for them inside its 44 hectares.

Consulates follow trade, tourists and diasporas rather than governments. Barcelona has the most mapped career consulates (83), then Istanbul (73), Sydney (72) and Milan (70). New York is the odd one out: 197 permanent missions to the United Nations are mapped there, but only 29 consulates, far fewer than the city has, which says more about mapping than diplomacy.

Embassies also cluster within cities. The densest square kilometre is around United Nations headquarters in New York (182 missions within a kilometre of one point); next comes Washington's Embassy Row along Massachusetts Avenue (95), then Beijing's embassy district (73) and The Hague (70).

04 · Far from the capitalWhen the embassies stay put

Embassies are expensive to move, and some never follow a new capital. Of 82 embassies to Israel in the data, 79 are in Tel Aviv and its suburbs and 3 in Jerusalem (Guatemala, Kosovo and United States). Israel designates Jerusalem as its capital; the status of the city is disputed, and most states keep their embassies in the Tel Aviv area. Missions to Palestine sit mostly in Ramallah (22 of 24 mapped).

Other gaps are older or newer. Bolivia's constitutional capital is Sucre, but all 33 mapped embassies are in La Paz, the seat of government. 111 of the 112 embassies to the Netherlands are in The Hague, none in Amsterdam. Tanzania (61 embassies in Dar es Salaam, none in Dodoma), Cote d'Ivoire (42 in Abidjan, none in Yamoussoukro) and Myanmar (46 in Yangon, none in Naypyidaw) have moved their capitals on paper, or in Myanmar's case in practice too, without the diplomats following.

Moves that worked leave consulates behind. Nigeria moved its capital from Lagos to Abuja in 1991; today 74 embassies are in Abuja and 3 in Lagos, but Lagos keeps 24 consulates. Brazil left Rio de Janeiro for Brasilia in 1960: 132 embassies in Brasilia, and 31 consulates in Rio and 29 in Sao Paulo. Ankara has all 141 embassies to Turkiye and Istanbul 73 consulates. Switzerland has the clearest split of all: 85 embassies in Bern, the federal city, and 58 permanent missions to the United Nations and other organisations in Geneva.

05 · Small states, long linksWho turns up where

The smallest sender of embassies is the Holy See, with 88 nunciatures for a state of about 825 people, more embassy-level missions than many large countries. Among the microstates, San Marino has 11, Monaco 10, and Tuvalu, with about 11,646 people, 4. At the other end, Liechtenstein hosts no resident embassy at all (embassies accredited to it sit in Bern, Berlin or Vienna); the data record just one each in Tuvalu, Nauru and Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, which may partly be a gap in the mapping.

The longest embassy link on the map is between Taiwan and Paraguay, whose capitals are 19,931 km apart, very nearly on opposite sides of the Earth. 175 embassy links join two states of under 12 million people whose capitals are more than 9,000 km apart: Switzerland in New Zealand, Panama in Singapore, Ireland in New Zealand.

Then there are neighbours who share a border but, in this data, no embassy. Of 323 pairs of states that touch, 17 have no embassy-level mission either way. Some are the world's hardest borders: the two Koreas, Armenia with Azerbaijan and with Turkiye, Israel with Lebanon, Syria and Palestine, Serbia and Kosovo, Morocco and the Sahrawi Republic. Others are probably gaps in the mapping: Botswana and Namibia have no embassy in this data, yet the 2005 Correlates of War data record representation between them in both directions.

06 · As the data record themSpecial cases

The Holy See. The papacy's diplomatic service is one of the oldest in the world. The data hold 92 located apostolic nunciatures in 88 states, which puts the Holy See 33rd of all senders by embassy-level network, and 87 states with an embassy to it, 74 of them mapped in Rome. Many nunciatures are accredited to several states, so states without a dot may still have a nuncio.

Taiwan. Only 12 states recognise the Republic of China (Taiwan), and the data record Taiwanese embassies in all 12 of them. Everywhere else Taiwan works through representative offices, usually called Taipei Economic and Cultural Offices: 52 are mapped, in 58 states. Lowy counted 110 Taiwanese posts in 2024; this map finds 93. 13 older records still described embassies between Taiwan and states that have since switched recognition to Beijing (Honduras, Nicaragua, Nauru, Kiribati, El Salvador, Burkina Faso, Sao Tome and Principe); I flagged them and left them out of every count.

Kosovo. 25 embassies are mapped in Pristina, and Kosovo has embassy-level missions in 34 states. Some states that do not recognise Kosovo keep liaison offices there, which the map shows as such.

Palestine. Palestine sends embassy-level missions to 92 states in the data. 24 foreign missions to Palestine are mapped, most in Ramallah; some are called embassies and others representative offices. Several states also keep consulates in Jerusalem (15 consulates of all kinds are mapped in the city); the data do not say whom each serves.

Western Sahara. The Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic has embassy-level missions in 14 states in the data. Inside the territory, OpenStreetMap maps only 2 consulates, both in Laayoune; consulates opened in Laayoune and Dakhla in recent years are largely missing, so this is a gap in the data, not a finding. Natural Earth's default borders, used for the colours on the map, follow the line of control.

The European Union is not a state but runs 130 embassy-level delegations, more than most countries, and the Sovereign Order of Malta, a Catholic order without territory, has 28 mapped missions.

07 · From the Amarna letters to todayThe diplomatic web grows

Diplomacy is far older than the embassy. Around 1350 BC the pharaoh's court at Amarna kept clay-tablet letters from the great kings of Babylon, Mitanni, Hatti and Assyria, from Alashiya on Cyprus and from Canaanite vassals; envoys travelled between them with gifts and brides. For three thousand years after that, most diplomacy was done by envoys who came, negotiated and went home: Zhang Qian to Central Asia, the Roman envoys who reached the Han court in 166, Charlemagne's embassy to Harun al-Rashid, the friars sent to the Mongol khans. The resident ambassador, who stays, is an invention of Renaissance Italy in the 1440s and 1450s; Spain had one in London by 1487, and the Ottoman Empire opened its first permanent embassy, also in London, only in 1793.

The timeline below starts with a small hand-compiled sample of 52 famous missions, letters, treaties and congresses from 2400 BC to 1815 (60 lines between 69 courts), then hands over to the Correlates of War data and ends with today's network. The early part is a sample of well-known cases, mostly from the Mediterranean, Middle East and East Asia, not a census. I checked each date against the Wikipedia article cited for it: 42 lines are confirmed, 10 approximate (the article gives a nearby year) and 8 not confirmed; tap a line on the map to see its status.

The Correlates of War project recorded, about every five years from 1817 to 2005, which states had diplomatic representation in which. In 1817 the system had 23 states and 198 links, and only 23 of them were at the rank of ambassador: an ambassador was a great power's privilege, and most envoys were ministers or charges d'affaires. France hosted the most, 13 envoys; the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies and Bavaria hosted almost as many as London. By 2005 there were 192 states and 8,110 links, and 93% of them were ambassadors.

The waves of new states are visible as jumps: 18 entrants by 1920 after the First World War, 39 in the 1960 and 1965 waves of African and Caribbean independence, and 24 in 1995 after the break-up of the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia. The count of links peaks in 1980 at 9,089 and is lower afterwards (6,411 in 1985); I cannot tell from the data alone how much of that fall is real and how much is a change in the sources.

The Cold War shows up as rival networks. West Germany refused for years to deal with states that recognised East Germany: in 1965 West Germany was represented in 93 states and East Germany in 12; after the two Germanys recognised each other in 1972, East Germany's network jumped to 81 by 1975, and by 1985 80 states hosted both. China and Taiwan never shared a host: the data record Taiwan's representatives in 26 states and the People's Republic's in 8 in 1950; by 1975, after the UN seat changed hands, it was 93 to 24, and by 2005 158 to 21. The United States was represented in more states than the Soviet Union in every wave (138 against 117 in 1985), but 11 states hosted Soviet representatives and no American ones.

08 · CoverageHow complete is each country?

Open data are only as good as the people who map them, so every country gets a coverage note. I compare each country's embassy-level links in 2026 with the number of states in which the Correlates of War data recorded it as represented in 2005. Twenty years have passed and many states have opened embassies since, so a ratio well below one suggests a gap. By that measure the network abroad looks complete for 185 of 190 countries (the median ratio is 1.20), and embassies hosted look complete for 180; the thinnest are Somalia, Central African Republic, Tuvalu and Saint Vincent and the Grenadines. OpenStreetMap and Wikidata agree on 7,099 embassy pairs; 1,604 are only in OpenStreetMap and 1,154 only in Wikidata, so combining them matters.

The comparison flatters in one way: it counts missions that are mapped, and some mapped embassies have closed or suspended work (in capitals at war, for instance) without anyone updating the map. And consulates and honorary consulates are mapped far less evenly than embassies, so their totals should be read as lower bounds.

09 · How I did thisMethods and caveats

OpenStreetMap. I started from every object tagged office=diplomatic or amenity=embassy, 17,573 in all. The tags say what kind of mission it is (diplomatic=embassy or consulate, with subtypes such as high_commission, nunciature, consulate_general or honorary_consul), which state sends it (country, by ISO code) and which receives it (target). I dropped 775 ambassadors' residences, 84 offices of international organisations, 289 objects whose sending state could not be worked out and 564 that were not diplomatic at all. Where the sending state was missing or clashed with an explicit name ("Embassy of Montenegro" tagged as Congo), I took it from the name, in English or one of 22 other languages, or from the linked Wikidata item (465 missions). The receiving state is the country the mission stands in, except for embassies to the Holy See (in Rome) and permanent missions, which are accredited to an organisation. I placed every mission in a territory with Natural Earth's borders and gave it the nearest large city. Duplicates (an embassy mapped both as a point and as a building) were merged when they were the same kind of mission from the same state within 350 metres (352 merged).

Wikidata. The Wikidata download asked for six classes. Checking their items by name showed that two were the wrong classes entirely, schools and colleges (20,523 items) and television channels (5,556), so I dropped them. Of the embassy, consulate and representative office items, I dropped 244 with an end date and those of states that no longer exist, linked 5,731 to OpenStreetMap through its wikidata tags, matched 1,722 by sending and receiving state, added 81 with coordinates that OpenStreetMap lacks, and kept 1,191 without coordinates as country pairs only.

Corrections. 13 records of embassies between Taiwan and states that have switched recognition were flagged as out of date and excluded; Taiwanese offices named as embassies in states that do not recognise Taiwan were counted as representative offices. 3 hand corrections are listed in the merge log: the Russian and Chinese offices in Pristina are liaison offices, and the European Union's office in Jerusalem is its representation to the Palestinians, not its delegation to Israel.

Deep history. The 60 lines before 1817 are a sample I compiled of famous missions, letters, treaties, tribute missions, congresses and the first resident embassies, each with conventional dates, approximate positions for the courts and an English Wikipedia article as its source (44 articles). I checked every date against its cited article: 42 lines are confirmed (the year appears in the article), 10 approximate (the article gives a nearby year, so the line is dated circa) and 8 not confirmed (the year does not appear in the article cited); the status of each line is in data/deep_history.csv and in the map's popups. The sample is weighted to famous and well-documented cases and says nothing about how much diplomacy there was in any period.

History. The Correlates of War Diplomatic Exchange data (version 2006.1) give the level at which each state was represented in every other, for 213 states, in 38 waves from 1817 to 2005. I count any level as a link and level 3 as an ambassador; the 1950 to 1965 waves record representation without a level. Capitals for historical states (Bavaria, the Two Sicilies, the Papal States) are approximate, and moving capitals are dated.

What this cannot say. A mapped mission may have closed, moved or suspended work; a missing one may simply not have been mapped. Coverage is best in Europe and the Americas and patchier in parts of Africa and Central Asia. Honorary consulates are mapped very unevenly. Non-resident accreditation, where one embassy covers several states, is not on the map, so a state with no dot may still have relations. The map says nothing about the quality of relations, only presence. Recognition is contested for several entities in the data; I describe how the data record them and do not take a position.