The Yangtze River, Yangzi River or Chang Jiang is the longest river in China and the third-longest river in the world. It rises at Jari Hill in the Tanggula Mountains of the Tibetan Plateau and flows for , including the Dam Qu River, the longest source of the Yangtze, in a generally easterly direction to the East China Sea. It is the fifth-largest primary river by discharge volume in the world. Its drainage basin comprises one-fifth of the land area of China, and is home to nearly one-third of the country's population.
The Yangtze has played a major role in the history, culture, and economy of China.For thousands of years, the river has been used for water, irrigation, sanitation, transportation, industry, boundary-marking, and war. The Yangtze Delta generates as much as 20% of China's GDP, and the Three Gorges Dam on the Yangtze is the largest hydro-electric power station in the world. In mid-2014, the Chinese government announced it was building a multi-tier transport network, comprising railways, roads and airports to create a new economic belt alongside the river.
The Yangtze flows through a wide array of ecosystems and is a habitat for several endemic and threatened species, including the Chinese alligator and the narrow-ridged finless porpoise, and was also the home of the now extinct Yangtze river dolphin (or ) and Chinese paddlefish, as well as the Yangtze sturgeon, which is extinct in the wild. In recent years, the river has suffered from industrial pollution, plastic pollution, agricultural runoff, siltation, and loss of wetland and lakes, which exacerbates seasonal flooding. Some sections of the river are now protected as nature reserves. A stretch of the upstream Yangtze flowing through deep gorges in western Yunnan is part of the Three Parallel Rivers of Yunnan Protected Areas, a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
Etymology Chinese (), meaning "Long River", is the name for the river in Chinese. However, the Chinese have given different names to sections of the river (it is from an ancient name to only a part of the river that the modern English name derives – see below).Yule, Henry
. The River of Golden Sand: The Narrative of a Journey Through China and Eastern Tibet to Burmah, Vol. 1, p. 35 . "Introductory Essay." 1880. Reprint: Cambridge University Press, 2010. Retrieved August 14, 2013.
In Old Chinese, the Yangtze was simply called Jiang/Kiang ,Baxter, Wm. H. & Sagart, Laurent. , p. 56. 2011. Retrieved August 12, 2013. a character of phono-semantic compound origin, combining the water radical with the homophone (now pronounced , but *kˤoŋ in Old ChineseBaxter & al. (2011), .). Kong was probably a word in the Austroasiatic language of local peoples such as the Yue. Similar to *krong in Proto-Vietnamese and krung in Mon, all meaning "river", it is related to modern Vietnamese sông (river) and Khmer krung (city on riverside), whence Thai krung (กรุง capital city), not kôngkea (water) which is from the Sanskrit root gáṅgā.Philipsen, Philip. Sound Business: The Reality of Chinese Characters, p. 12 . iUniverse (Lincoln), 2005. Retrieved August 12, 2013.
By the Han dynasty, had come to mean any river in Chinese, and this river was distinguished as the "Great River" (). The epithet (simplified version ), meaning "long", was first formally applied to the river during the Six Dynasties period.
Various sections of the Yangtze have local names. From Yibin to Yichang, the river through Sichuan and Chongqing Municipality is also known as the () or "Sichuan River". In Hubei, the river is also called the () or the "Jing River" after Jingzhou, one of the Nine Provinces of ancient China. In Anhui, the river takes on the local name after the shorthand name for Anhui, (皖). Jinsha ("Gold Sands") River refers to the of the Yangtze from Yibin upstream to the confluence with the Batang River near Yushu in Qinghai, while the Tongtian ("Leading to Heaven") River describes the section from Yushu up to the confluence of the Tuotuo River and the Dangqu River.
() or the "Yangzi River", from which the English name Yangtze is derived, is the local name for the Lower Yangtze in the region of Yangzhou. The name likely comes from an ancient ferry crossing called or (). Europeans who arrived in the Yangtze River Delta region applied this local name to the whole river.
English and other European
In the West, the river was called Quian () and Quianshui () by Marco Polo,Pelliot, Paul. Notes on Marco Polo, Vol. 2, p. 818 . L'Académie des Inscriptions e Belles-Lettres e avec le Concours du Centre national de la Recherche scientifique (Paris), 1959–1973. Retrieved August 13, 2013. and appeared on the earliest English maps as Kian or Kiam.E.g., Moll, Herman. "The Empire of China and island of Japan, agreeable to modern history. " Bowles & Bowles (London), 1736. Retrieved August 13, 2013.Encyclopædia Britannica, 3rd ed. "Kiam ." Bell & Macfarquhar (Edinburgh), 1797. Retrieved August 14, 2013. By the mid-19th century, these romanizations had standardized as Kiang.
A related form also popularized in English was "Kian-ku,"Bridgman, Elijah (ed.) The Chinese Repository, Vol. I, pp. 37 ff . "Review. Ta Tsing Wan-neën Yih-tung King-wei Yu-too,–'A General Geographical Map, with Degrees of Latitude and Longitude, of the Empire of the Ta Tsing Dynasty–May It Last Forever', by Le Mingche Tsinglae." Canton Mission Press (Guangdong), 1833. also spelled "Keeang-Koo"Bell, James. A System of Geography, Popular and Scientific; or a Physical, Political, and Statistical Account of the World and its Various Divisions, Vol. V, Part I, p. 215 . "Chinese Tartary." A. Fullarton & Co. (London), 1849. Retrieved August 13, 2013. and "Kyang Kew",Tanner, B. "China divided into its Great Provinces According to the best Authorities ." Mathew Carey (Philadelphia), 1795. Retrieved August 13, 2013. derived from mistaking the Chinese term for the mouth of the Yangtze (, Jiāngkǒu) as the name of the river itself.
The name Blue River began to be applied in the 18th century, apparently owing to a former name of the Dam Chu or Min and to analogy with the Yellow River,Aloian, Molly. Rivers Around the World: The Yangtze: China's Majestic River, p. 6 . Crabtree Publishing Co. (New York), 2010. Retrieved August 13, 2013.Room, Adrian. Placenames of the World, p. 395 . 1997. Reprint: McFarland (Jefferson, N.C.), 2003. Retrieved August 13, 2013. but it was frequently explained in early English references as a 'translation' of Jiang,The Modern Part of an Universal History, from the Earliest Accounts to the Present Time, Vol. XXXVII, p. 57 . "Of the Empires of China and Japan." (London), 1783.Wilkes, John. Encyclopaedia Londinensis, or, Universal Dictionary of Arts, Sciences, and Literature, Vol. XI, p. 851 . "Koko Nor." J. Adlard (London), 1812. Jiangkou, or Yangzijiang.Liber, Nadine. Life. "A Scary Pageant in Peking", p. 60. September 4, 1964. Retrieved August 14, 2013. . Very common in 18th- and 19th-century sources, the name fell out of favor due to growing awareness of its lack of any connection to the river's Chinese namesDavis, John. The Chinese: A General Description of the Empire of China and Its Inhabitants, Vol. 1, pp. 132 ff . C. Knight, 1836.The St. James's Magazine, Vol. XIV, p. 230 . "A Cruise on the Yangtze Kyang." W. Kent & Co. (London), 1865. and to the irony of its application to such a muddy waterway.Moncrieff, A.R.H. The World of To-day: A Survey of the Lands and Peoples of The Globe as Seen in Travel and Commerce, Vol. I, p. 42 . Gresham Publishing Co. (London), 1907.
Matteo Ricci's 1615 Latin account De Christiana expeditione apud Sinas included descriptions of the "Iansu" and "Iansuchian."Ricci, Matteo & al. De Christiana Expeditione Apud Sinas Suscepta ab Societate Jesu, Libri V, 1615. New Edition: De Christiana Expeditione apud Sinas suscepta ab Societate Iesu, Libri V, pp. 365 ff. , Bernardus Gualterus (Cologne), 1617. Retrieved August 14, 2013. The posthumous account's translation of the name as Fils de la Mer ("Son of the Ocean")Ricci, Matteo & al. Samuel Purchas (trans.) in Hakluytus Posthumus, or Purchas His Pilgrimes, Vol. XII, p. 305 . "A Generall Collection and Historicall representation of the Jesuites entrance into Japon and China, until their admission in the Royall Citie of Nanquin." 1625. Reprint: MacLehose & Co. (Glasgow), 1906. Retrieved August 14, 2013. shows that Ricci, who by the end of his life was fluent in literary Chinese, was introduced to it as the homophonic rather than the usual . Further, although railroads and the Shanghai concessions subsequently turned it into a backwater, Yangzhou was the lower river's principal port for much of the Qing dynasty, directing Liangjiang's important salt monopoly and connecting the Yangtze with the Grand Canal to Beijing. (That connection also made it one of the Yellow River's principal ports between the floods of 1344 and the 1850s, during which time the Yellow River ran well south of Shandong and discharged into the ocean a mere few hundred kilometers from the mouth of the Yangtze.)
(), or the "Yangzi River", from which the English name Yangtze is derived, is the local name for the Lower Yangtze in the region of Yangzhou (see above). Europeans who arrived in the Yangtze River Delta region applied this local name to the whole river.
By 1800, English cartographers such as Aaron Arrowsmith had adopted the French style of the nameE.g., in Didier, Robert & al. "L'Empire de la Chine ." Boudet (Paris), 1751. Retrieved August 14, 2013. as Yang-tse or Yang-tse Kiang.Arrowsmith, Aaron. "Asia ." G. Allen (London), 1801. Retrieved August 14, 2013. The British diplomat Thomas Wade emended this to Yang-tzu Chiang as part of his formerly popular romanization of Chinese, based on the Beijing dialect instead of Nanjing's and first published in 1867. The spellings Yangtze and Yangtze Kiang was a compromise between the two methods adopted at the 1906 Imperial Postal Conference in Shanghai, which established postal romanization. Hanyu Pinyin was adopted by the PRC's First Congress in 1958, but it was not widely employed in English outside mainland China prior to the normalization of diplomatic relations between the United States and the PRC in 1979; since that time, the spelling Yangzi has also been used.
Tibetan
The source and upper reaches of the Yangtze are located in ethnic Tibetan areas of Qinghai.Yang & al. Tibetan Geography, p. 73. China Intercontinental Press, 2004. . In Tibetan, the Tuotuo headwaters are the Machu (, lit. "Red Water"). The Tongtian is the Drichu (, 'Bri Chu'), literally "Water of the Female Yak"; transliterated into ).
Geography
The river originates from several tributaries in the eastern part of the Tibetan Plateau, two of which are commonly referred to as the "source." Traditionally, the Chinese government has recognized the source as the Tuotuo tributary at the base of a glacier lying on the west of Geladandong Mountain in the Tanggula Mountains. This source is found at and while not the furthest source of the Yangtze, it is the highest source at above sea level. The true source of the Yangtze, hydrologically the longest river distance from the sea, is at Jari Hill at the head of the Dam Qu tributary, approximately southeast of Geladandong. This source was only discovered in the late 20th century and lies in wetlands at and above sea level just southeast of Chadan Township in Zadoi County, Yushu Prefecture, Qinghai. As the historical spiritual source of the Yangtze, the Geladandong source is still commonly referred to as the source of the Yangtze since the discovery of the Jari Hill source.
These tributaries join and the river then runs eastward through Qinghai (Tsinghai), turning southward down a deep valley at the border of Sichuan (Szechwan) and Tibet to reach Yunnan. In the course of this valley, the river's elevation drops from above to less than . Thus, over the first of its length, the river has fallen more than .