Zhejiang Province, located in the southern part of the Yangtze River Delta of the southeast coast of China, lies in the east of the East China Sea, south of Fujian Province, west of Jiangxi Province and Anhui Province, and north of Shanghai and Jiangsu Province. Zhejiang, which literally means a zigzagging river, is named because of the largest river in that territory, Qiantang River. The name of the province is often abbreviated to its first character "浙" or Zhe, with Hangzhou as its provincial capital.

The straight-line distance between south and north, east and west are both about 450 kilometers, and the land area is 101,800 square kilometers, occupying 1.06% of the whole country and making itself one of China's smallest provinces. There are two sub-provincial cities in the province, namely, Hangzhou and Ningbo, and nine prefecture-level cities, namely Wenzhou, Huzhou, Jiaxing, Shaoxing, Jinhua, Quzhou, Zhoushan, Taizhou, and Lishui. The number of the resident population of the province is 56.57 million by the end of 2017.

There are two sub-provincial cities in the province, namely, Hangzhou and Ningbo, and nine prefecture-level cities, namely Wenzhou, Huzhou, Jiaxing, Shaoxing, Jinhua, Quzhou, Zhoushan, Taizhou, and Lishui. The eleven prefecture-level divisions of Zhejiang are subdivided into 37 districts, 19 county-level cities, 32 counties and one autonomous county, 639 towns, 264 townships (including 14 ethnic townships), and 421 subdistricts.