Yangtze
Asia's longest river, the spine of China
The Yangtze drains nearly a fifth of China's land and touches the lives of roughly a third of its people. From glacial headwaters on the Tibetan Plateau it falls through deep gorges, broadens across the central plains and finally empties past Shanghai into the East China Sea. It is the longest river in Asia and the third longest on Earth, and for most of Chinese history it has served as the great east-west artery linking the interior to the coast.
The river's upper reaches plunge through the Three Gorges, a stretch of vertical cliffs and ferocious rapids that long made navigation perilous. Below them the gradient eases into a fertile lowland of lakes, canals and rice paddies, the historic granary of China. Here the Yangtze is fed by huge tributaries and linked to seasonal lakes like Dongting and Poyang that swell and shrink with the monsoon. At its mouth a low, silt-laden delta has built one of the most productive and densely settled landscapes anywhere.
The Three Gorges Dam, completed in 2012, is the largest hydroelectric power station in the world — it tamed catastrophic floods and generates vast electricity, but it submerged ancient towns, displaced more than a million people and altered the river's sediment and ecology. The Yangtze's wildlife has paid a price: the baiji river dolphin is now considered functionally extinct. Even so the river remains the economic engine of modern China, its lower valley home to Shanghai, Nanjing, Wuhan and Chongqing.