Yangtze
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, 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 habitat to several endemic and threatened species, including the Chinese alligator, the narrow-ridged finless porpoise, and also was the home of the now extinct Yangtze river dolphin 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.In Old Chinese, the Yangtze was simply called Jiang/Kiang 江, a character of phono-semantic compound origin, combining the water radical 氵 with the homophone 工. 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 and Khmer krung, whence Thai krung, not kôngkea which is from the Sanskrit root gáṅgā.
File:Mouth of the Yangtze 1754.jpg|thumb|right|250px|The "Great River" with its entrance to the East China Sea marked as the "Mouth of the Yangtze" on the Jiangnan map in the 1754 Provincial Atlas of the Qing Empire
By the Han dynasty, had come to mean any river in Chinese, and this river was distinguished as the "Great River" 大江. The epithet 長, 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, . Jinsha River refers to the of the Yangtze from Yibin upstream to the confluence with the Batang River near Yushu in Qinghai, while the Tongtian 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
In the West, the river was called Quian and Quianshui by Marco Polo, and appeared on the earliest English maps as Kian or Kiam. By the mid-19th century, these romanizations had standardized as Kiang.A related form also popularized in English was "Kian-ku," also spelled "Keeang-Koo" and "Kyang Kew", derived from mistaking the Chinese term for the mouth of the Yangtze 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, but it was frequently explained in early English references as a 'translation' of Jiang, Jiangkou, or Yangzijiang. 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 names and to the irony of its application to such a muddy waterway.
Matteo Ricci's 1615 Latin account included descriptions of the "Ianſu" and "Ianſuchian." The posthumous account's translation of the name as Fils de la Mer shows that Ricci, who by the end of his life was fluent in literary Chinese, was introduced to it as the homophonic 洋子江 rather than the usual 揚子江. 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.
, 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. 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 name as Yang-tse or Yang-tse Kiang. 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. In Tibetan, the Tuotuo headwaters are the Machu. The Tongtian is the Drichu.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, turning southward down a deep valley at the border of Sichuan 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.
It enters the basin of Sichuan at Yibin. While in the Sichuan basin, it receives several large tributaries, increasing its water volume significantly. It then cuts through Mount Wushan bordering Chongqing and Hubei to create the famous Three Gorges. Eastward of the Three Gorges, Yichang is the first city on the Yangtze Plain.
After entering Hubei province, the Yangtze receives water from a number of lakes. The largest of these lakes is Dongting Lake, which is located on the border of Hunan and Hubei provinces, and is the outlet for most of the rivers in Hunan. At Wuhan, it receives its biggest tributary, the Han River, bringing water from its northern basin as far as Shaanxi.
At the northern tip of Jiangxi province, Lake Poyang, the biggest freshwater lake in China, merges into the river. The river then runs through Anhui and Jiangsu, receiving more water from innumerable smaller lakes and rivers, and finally reaches the East China Sea at Shanghai.
Four of China's five main freshwater lakes contribute their waters to the Yangtze River. Traditionally, the upstream part of the Yangtze River refers to the section from Yibin to Yichang; the middle part refers to the section from Yichang to Hukou County, where Lake Poyang meets the river; the downstream part is from Hukou to Shanghai.
The origin of the Yangtze River has been dated by some geologists to about 45 million years ago in the Eocene, but this dating has been disputed.