Location
rises at Tanggula, Qinghai · flows to the East China Sea
The great river of life running across China f...
The great river of life running across China from west to east. Rising from the Geladandong snow peaks of the Tanggula Mountains, the Yangtze runs some 6,300 kilometers — first in China, third in the world. It nourished rice-growing civilization, threading together the three great cultural regions of Ba-Shu, Jing-Chu and Jiangnan; with the Yellow River it holds up the Chinese world, and today it is the golden waterway and economic artery linking east and west.
The river's source region lies on the northern slopes of the Tanggula Mountains, where three headstreams — the Tuotuo, the Dam Chu and the Chumar — converge. Expeditions in 1976 and 1978 fixed the source at the Tuotuo River on the southwest flank of Geladandong (6,621 m), main peak of the Tanggula: glacial meltwater sets out here for a journey of more than six thousand kilometers to the sea. The confirmation of "the source of the Yangtze" was a landmark achievement of modern Chinese geography.
The Three Gorges run from Baidicheng at Fengjie to Nanjinguan at Yichang — Qutang's majesty, Wu Gorge's grace, Xiling's peril — mountains linked on both banks, the river drawn into a single band: the most magnificent movement in the Yangtze's music. On the Jinsha River, Tiger Leaping Gorge narrows to about 30 meters, with nearly 3,800 meters of relief against the Jade Dragon and Haba snow peaks — one of the deepest gorges in the world. The Three Gorges project was fully completed in 2009; beyond flood control, power and navigation, "a calm lake risen in the high gorges" has become a new landscape of the nation.
无边落木萧萧下，不尽长江滚滚来。 — "Boundless falling leaves rustle down; the endless Yangtze comes rolling on."—— Du Fu, "Climbing High" (Tang dynasty)
Rice remains of the Shangshan culture ten thousand years old and the stilt houses of Hemudu seven thousand years ago prove the Yangtze basin a center of origin of rice farming. Liangzhu's water-city, the bronze sacred trees of Sanxingdui, the romance of the Chu Ci, the courts of the Six Dynasties, the markets of the Southern Song, the Jiangnan taxes that carried half the empire in Ming and Qing — behind the proverb "when Suzhou and Huzhou ripen, all under Heaven is fed" lies the Yangtze's thousand-year lifting of China's economic center of gravity to the south.
The Yangtze system's navigable waters exceed 65,000 kilometers, its cargo throughput the highest of any river in the world — hence "the Golden Waterway." The Yangtze finless porpoise — "the panda of the water" — has seen its population stop falling and begin to rise after the ten-year fishing ban, reaching 1,249 in the 2022 survey. The baiji has been declared functionally extinct — but the ten-year ban is bringing this mother river back to life.