The Yangtze
The Yangtze is the longest river in Asia and the third longest in the world. It flows for 6,300 km across China, from the snowy mountains of Tibet to the East China Sea near Shanghai. The Yangtze supports about a third of all the people in China, and along its length sits the largest dam in the world.
- Length6,300 kmThird longest river in the world
- CountryChinaEntirely within one country
- SourceTibetan PlateauHigh in the mountains of western China
- MouthEast China SeaNear the city of Shanghai
- People living nearapprox. 400 millionAbout a third of China's population
- Biggest damThree GorgesThe largest hydroelectric dam on Earth
The Yangtze among the world's great rivers
The Yangtze is just shorter than the Amazon and the Nile, and longer than any river in Europe or Africa.
What is the Yangtze?
The Yangtze, called the Chang Jiang ("Long River") in Chinese, is China's main river. It starts high on the Tibetan Plateau, then winds through deep gorges, broad fertile plains, and big cities, before pouring into the East China Sea. The river basin covers nearly one fifth of China and is home to about a third of the country's 1.4 billion people. Major cities along its banks include Chongqing, Wuhan, Nanjing and (at its mouth) Shanghai.
The Three Gorges Dam
The Yangtze is the site of the largest dam in the world. The Three Gorges Dam, completed in 2012, stretches 2.3 km across the river and stands 181 metres high. It generates more electricity than any other power station on Earth (around 100 terawatt-hours a year, enough to power Germany for two months). The dam also helps control flooding, which historically killed hundreds of thousands of people downstream.
Building the dam was hugely controversial. The reservoir behind it flooded an area larger than Singapore, forcing 1.3 million people to leave their homes. Many ancient archaeological sites were lost forever. The dam has also affected wildlife and contributed to landslides and earthquakes nearby.
The lost river dolphin
For thousands of years, the Yangtze had its own freshwater dolphin, called the baiji. It was a pale, almost blind dolphin (the muddy water made eyesight useless, so it navigated by sound). In 2006 scientists carried out a careful search and could not find a single one. The baiji is now considered functionally extinct, the first dolphin species to be wiped out by human activity. The main causes were boat collisions, fishing-net entanglement, and pollution.
Other Yangtze species, including the Chinese paddlefish (declared extinct in 2020) and the Yangtze finless porpoise (only around 1,000 left) are at similar risk.
Deeper dive: Yangtze geography, the South-North Water Transfer Project and the river's wildlife crisis
The Yangtze divides naturally into three parts. The upper Yangtze runs through Tibet, Yunnan and into the spectacular limestone gorges of Sichuan and Hubei. The middle Yangtze flows through broad fertile lowlands packed with farms, lakes and cities. The lower Yangtze reaches the densely populated Yangtze River Delta around Shanghai. The Yangtze's tributaries include the Han (the longest), the Min, the Jialing and the Wu.
Northern China is dry and has too little water; southern China is wet and has too much. To balance this, the Chinese government built the South-North Water Transfer Project, the largest water-transfer engineering project ever attempted. Three giant canal systems (eastern, central and western) move water from the Yangtze basin to the dry north. The central route, completed in 2014, supplies Beijing with about a quarter of its water. The full project, when complete, will move tens of billions of cubic metres of water per year.
The wildlife losses in the Yangtze are among the most striking in modern conservation. The Yangtze River dolphin (Lipotes vexillifer, the baiji) was last reliably seen in 2002 and an intensive 2006 survey could not find any. The Chinese paddlefish, a huge freshwater fish that could grow over 7 metres long and had survived for 200 million years, was officially declared extinct in 2020. The Yangtze finless porpoise (the last freshwater porpoise) is critically endangered with around 1,000 individuals. The Chinese alligator (an ancient relative of crocodiles) has around 200 wild individuals. Causes include the Three Gorges Dam, pollution, overfishing, and constant heavy boat traffic on China's most important waterway.
The country is China. The biggest river in the world is the Amazon.