China’s Long River runs 6,236 kilometres to the sea
The Yangtze—Chang Jiang, the Long River—is China’s longest and the world’s third-longest, rising at Jari Hill on the Tibetan Plateau’s Tanggula range. It empties into the East China Sea after 6,236 kilometres, powering both the Three Gorges Dam and roughly a fifth of China’s GDP in its delta.
For millennia the channel has supplied water, irrigation, transport, industry, borders, and battlefields. It ranks fifth among primary rivers by discharge. English Yangtze comes from Yangzi Jiang, once a lower-river name near Yangzhou; Chinese speakers call the whole Chang Jiang, while older usage simply said Jiang—river—before Da Jiang, Great River, and the ‘long’ epithet stuck.
Ecosystems along the course once hosted the Yangtze river dolphin (baiji) and Chinese paddlefish—now gone—plus still-threatened Chinese alligator, narrow-ridged finless porpoise, and wild-extinct Yangtze sturgeon. Industrial and plastic pollution and farm runoff have all degraded the river in recent years. Old Chinese simply called it Jiang, a word probably borrowed from the Austroasiatic speech of peoples such as the Yue and related to Vietnamese sông, river.
Stretches carry their own names: Chuan Jiang, the Sichuan River, from Yibin to Yichang, Jing Jiang in Hubei and Wan Jiang in Anhui. Western names wandered too. Marco Polo wrote Quian, early English maps Kian or Kiam, and the 18th and 19th centuries favoured Blue River, a label with no link to any Chinese name that eventually fell from use. Around 1800 Aaron Arrowsmith used Yang-tse Kiang, and the spelling Yangtze was fixed as a compromise at the 1906 Imperial Postal Conference.
The officially recognised source is the Tuotuo, below a glacier west of Geladandong Mountain, the highest though not the most distant headwater; Tibetans call it the Machu, Red Water. Across its first 2,600 km the river falls more than 5,200 m, plunging down a deep valley on the Sichuan–Tibet border into Yunnan. It enters the Sichuan basin at Yibin, gathers large tributaries, then carves the Three Gorges through Mount Wushan before reaching Yichang, the first city on the Yangtze Plain, and in Hubei it takes in lakes such as Dongting.
Source: Yangtze
