The Yangtze runs 6,300 km, the Yellow River 5,464 km, and the four seas cover 4.73 million km² — water shaped China’s civilization, its produce and its fate.
Because the land falls from west to east, nearly all of China’s great rivers run east to the sea. The Yangtze and the Yellow River — one supple, one fierce — hold up the skeleton of Huaxia civilization; the lakes are its reservoirs and the seas its gateways.
The Yangtze is about 6,300 km long — the longest river in Asia and third longest in the world. It starts from the glaciers of the Tanggula Mountains, carves through the Hengduan ranges and the Three Gorges with the world’s greatest hydropower reserves, meanders through the flood-prone Jingjiang stretch, and widens at last into a true golden waterway — its main-stem freight tonnage leads all the world’s rivers.
About two-fifths of China’s people live in the Yangtze basin, which produces over forty percent of the economy. Shanghai, Nanjing, Wuhan, Chongqing — the river strings together China’s longest chain of cities.
The Yellow River runs about 5,464 km and carries more sediment than any other river on Earth — crossing the Loess Plateau it earns the saying “a bowl of water, half a bowl of sand.” The silt settles downstream, raising the bed year by year into a “hanging river” above the surrounding land: near Kaifeng the riverbed stands nearly ten meters above the city.
Famous for “silting, breaching and wandering,” the river made more than twenty great course changes in two millennia, growing its delta as it went. It built the North China Plain and built the Chinese history of taming water — the legend of Yu the Great, the river officials of every dynasty, and today’s sediment-flushing at Xiaolangdi are one continuous three-thousand-year conversation.
Lakes fall into two camps. The freshwaters of the middle-lower Yangtze — Poyang, Dongting, Taihu — hang like reservoirs on the river’s course; on the plateau, Qinghai Lake is China’s largest lake (saline), with Namtso and Siling high in the snow country.
The seas from north to south: the Bohai (an inner sea), the Yellow Sea, the East China Sea, the South China Sea — and beyond the coast, more than 11,000 islands. Two more waters deserve mention: the Tarim, China’s longest inland river, dies in the depths of the Taklamakan Desert; and the Beijing–Hangzhou Grand Canal, about 1,794 km, is a man-made north–south artery still carrying water today.