60 Fun Facts About Yangtze

Where does the Yangtze rank among the world's longest rivers?

Only the Nile and the Amazon are longer; it is the longest river in China.

What does the Chinese name Chang Jiang literally mean?

The epithet 'long' was first formally applied during the Six Dynasties period; earlier it was simply 'the River'.

Where does the Yangtze rise?

Its source is at Jari Hill, and it flows about 6,236 km to the East China Sea.

Into which sea does the Yangtze empty?

Its estuary carries almost 1,000 cubic kilometres of water a year.

Roughly what share of China's population lives in the Yangtze basin?

The basin covers a fifth of China's land area.

The English name 'Yangtze' comes from a local name for the lower river near which city?

It probably derives from an ancient ferry crossing called Yangzi; Europeans in the delta applied the local name to the whole river.

What alternative English name for the Yangtze arose in the 18th century by analogy with the Yellow one?

Marco Polo had called it Quian, and early English maps showed it as Kian or Kiam.

What does Jinsha, the name of the upper Yangtze from Yibin to Qinghai, mean?

The Tongtian ('Leading to Heaven') River is the stretch above it.

Which famous canyon does the Jinsha stretch of the Yangtze pass through in the far southwest?

The upstream section through Yunnan is part of the UNESCO Three Parallel Rivers site.

What are the names of the Three Gorges, from west to east?

They stretch 193 miles from Baidicheng in Chongqing to Nanjin Pass at Yichang.

How long is the Three Gorges stretch of the river?

Junks were once hauled upstream through it by 70 to 80 'trackers' harnessed to ropes.

What is the Three Gorges Dam's claim to fame?

Its installed capacity is 22,500 MW and it generates around 95 TWh a year.

Which Chinese leader first envisioned a great dam across the Yangtze, in a 1919 book?

Construction finally began on 14 December 1994.

Near which city is the Three Gorges Dam?

The Gezhouba Dam and the gorges themselves are all in the city's Yiling District.

Roughly how many people were displaced by the Three Gorges reservoir?

Planners expected 13 cities, 140 towns and 1,350 villages to be partly or fully flooded.

The steel used in the Three Gorges Dam would be enough to build how many Eiffel Towers?

It took 27.2 million cubic metres of concrete and 463,000 tonnes of steel.

In which year did the Three Gorges power plant become fully operational, with its 32nd turbine?

The first generator started up in July 2003; the ship lift came last, in 2015.

How long is the Three Gorges Dam?

The concrete wall stands 181 metres above its rock base.

Which was the only other dam on the Yangtze's main stem besides Three Gorges, as of 2007?

Built in the early 1980s, it blocked the sturgeon's route to its spawning grounds.

Which Yangtze river dolphin was declared functionally extinct after a 2006 survey found none?

Nicknamed the Goddess of the Yangtze, it may be the first dolphin species wiped out by humans.

The Chinese paddlefish, declared extinct in a 2019 study, may have grown to what length?

It was among the largest freshwater fish on Earth and was last seen alive in 2003.

Which animal is China's only surviving freshwater cetacean?

Its numbers rose to just over a thousand by 2017, and it was listed as critically endangered.

The Chinese alligator, historically called the 'muddy dragon', survives in the wild in which province?

One of the smallest crocodilians, it grows to about 1.5-2 metres and brumates in burrows.

How long can the Chinese giant salamander, one of the world's largest amphibians, grow?

It is critically endangered, partly because it is eaten as a delicacy.

How long is the fishing moratorium China imposed on the Yangtze in January 2020?

It covers 332 sites and, under the new law, all natural waterways, tributaries and lakes.

The Yangtze-Huai floods often ranked among the deadliest natural disasters ever struck in which year?

Official figures said 2 million died; some Western estimates run to 4 million.

How many people were made homeless by the 1998 Yangtze floods?

About 3,700 died and economic losses were put at $24 billion.

The Battle of Red Cliffs on the Yangtze in 208-209 AD saw the defeat of which northern warlord?

His ships, chained together against seasickness, were destroyed by fire ships.

Until 1957 there was no bridge across the Yangtze between Yibin and Shanghai. Which city got the first?

Soviet engineers helped design the double-deck road-rail bridge from Turtle Hill to Snake Hill.

The Nanjing Yangtze River Bridge, opened in 1968, was the first to cross which part of the river?

Like the Wuhan bridge it is a double-decked road-rail truss bridge.

Which leader took staged swims in the Yangtze at Wuhan in 1956 and 1966 to show off his health?

The stunts set off a swimming craze pushed by party propaganda.

Wuhan grew from the merger of three towns on the Yangtze and Han rivers. Which is NOT one of them?

The 1911 Wuchang Uprising there ended 2,000 years of dynastic rule.

Which landmark on the Wuchang bank of the Yangtze was first built in AD 223 for Sun Quan?

It is counted among the Four Great Towers of China.

Which Yangtze city served as China's wartime capital under Chiang Kai-shek from 1937 to 1946?

Known as the Fog City, it was carved out of Sichuan as a municipality in 1997 and is the world's largest city proper by population.

Which river arrives through its own 'Lesser Three Gorges' to join the Yangtze at the Fog City?

The Fog City gets more than 100 days of fog a year.

What is China's largest body of fresh water, which drains into the Yangtze in Jiangxi?

Up to 90% of the world's Siberian cranes winter there.

Which body of water on the Hunan-Hubei border is the outlet for most of Hunan's rivers?

Traditionally the 'middle Yangtze' runs from Yichang to Hukou, where Poyang meets the river.

Roughly what share of China's GDP does the Yangtze Delta generate?

The region of Shanghai, southern Jiangsu and northern Zhejiang has an economy about the size of France's.

The Grand Canal links the Yangtze basin to which northern city?

At 1,776 km from Beijing to Hangzhou it is the world's longest artificial waterway.

Which ruler completed the Grand Canal in 609, linking the Yangtze region to Luoyang?

Five million labourers built the first major section, finished in 605.

The South-North Water Transfer Project aims to move how much Yangtze water north each year?

It is the world's largest water transfer scheme, using three canal routes.

The Yangtze is the fifth-largest river in the world by what measure?

Its basin drains a fifth of China's land area.

How far back has human activity been verified in the Three Gorges area?

By the 5th millennium BC the lower Yangtze's Hemudu and Majiabang cultures were among the earliest rice growers.

Which crop was first cultivated by the lower Yangtze's Hemudu and Majiabang cultures?

That was in the 5th millennium BC.

The upper Yangtze's deep southwestern gorges belong to which UNESCO World Heritage Site?

The Salween and Mekong run alongside it there.

What is the traditional dividing point between the upper and middle Yangtze?

The middle river runs from there to Hukou, and the lower from Hukou to Shanghai.

Tourist boat trips along the Yangtze are popularly known by what name?

It is one of China's most popular tourist attractions.

What did the Chinese government announce in mid-2014 it would build along the Yangtze?

The plan combined railways, roads and airports.

Which dam has blocked the Yangtze sturgeon from its Jinsha spawning grounds since 1993?

The species is now listed as extinct in the wild.

How much rain fell on the Yangtze basin in June and July 2020 compared with the previous 41-year average?

It was the heaviest rainfall since 1961.

What does the name Tongtian, for the section of the Yangtze above Yushu, mean?

It runs 813 km up to the meeting of the Tuotuo and Dangqu rivers.

Which British diplomat's romanisation gave English the spelling 'Yang-tzu Chiang' in 1867?

His system was based on the Beijing dialect rather than Nanjing's.

What is the Yangtze's biggest tributary, which joins it at Wuhan?

It brings water from a northern basin reaching as far as Shaanxi province.

What is the Yangtze called locally as it flows through Sichuan and Chongqing, from Yibin to Yichang?

In Hubei it becomes the Jing Jiang after ancient Jingzhou, and in Anhui the Wan Jiang after that province's shorthand name.

Where was the 1906 Imperial Postal Conference that fixed the spelling 'Yangtze' held?

The postal romanization was a compromise between Thomas Wade's 'Yang-tzu' and older spellings.

At what altitude does the Yangtze's hydrological source at Jari Hill lie?

Discovered only in the late 20th century, it sits in wetlands in Qinghai's Zadoi County, though the Geladandong glacier source is still widely cited.

Which ancient waterway links the upper Xiang River to the Pearl River system via the Guijiang?

It gave a direct water route from the Yangtze basin to the Pearl River Delta, far less famous than the Grand Canal to the north.

In 333 BC, which state united the lower Yangtze by annexing Yue?

Yue's royal family was said to have fled south to found the Minyue kingdom in Fujian; Qin later conquered Ba and Shu upriver to attack Chu.

What does the Tibetan name for the Tongtian stretch, Drichu, literally mean?

The river's source and upper reaches lie in ethnic Tibetan areas of Qinghai, where the Tuotuo headwaters are called the Machu.

The Yangtze's middle section traditionally ends at Hukou County, where which body of water joins it?

The upper section runs from Yibin to Yichang and the lower from Hukou down to the East China Sea.