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The Yangtze River is the longest river in Asia and third longest in the world. The headwaters of the Yangtze are situated at an elevation of about 16,000 feet in the Kunlun Mountains in the southwestern section of Qinghai. Yangtze River rises from the Tanggula Ranges. The river winds 6,300 kilometers (3,900 miles) through the country from west to east and earns a name "Changjiang" - simply, Long River in Chinese.
The Yangtze River can be divided into three parts:
The Upper Reaches is from the source of Qinghai Province to Yichang in Hubei Province. It is the most attractive part of the river cruise with wild mountain ranges, unbroken ravines, dangerous rapids and charming landscape. Along this 200-kilometer-long (130 miles) stretch, the river passes through the Three Gorges. In the Qutang Gorge, the river is only 100 meters wide with some 60 meters (200 feet) hydraulic gradient. In the Wu Gorge, mountains rise to a height of 500 to 1,000 meters ( 1,600 to 3,300 feet). In Xiling Gorge, China's largest engineering project - the Yangtze Three Gorge Dam is intended to control disastrous flooding and provide enough hydroelectricity to power most of central and eastern China.
The Middle Reaches is from Yichang to Hukou at the mouth Poyanag Lake in Jiangxi Province, a distance of about 1,000 kilometers (620 miles). This region features fiat lands and the Dongting and the Poyang feed into the river.
The Lower Reaches is from Hukou to the estuary. The landscape in the river's lower course is typified by a flat delta plain, crisscrossed by canals and waterways. The region has been known for centuries as the “Land of Fish and Rice”. Because port named Yangzi in the ancient time, the stretch has another name Yangtze with which missionaries and colonialists became familiar and which, as a result, became established in Europe as the name of the whole river.
The Three Gorges Dam
One and a half miles wide and 610 feet tall, the gargantuan Three Gorges Dam is China's largest construction project since the Great Wall. The People's Republic of China decided to dam the Yangtze in 1994 with a steel and concrete wall that would take 15 years and over $30 billion to build. When completed, the dam will contain twice the amount of concrete of the Itaipu Dam in Brazil, currently the world's largest. It will create a five trillion gallon reservoir hundreds of feet deep and about 400 miles long, able to absorb an earthquake measuring 7.0 on the Richter Scale. It will allow 10,000-ton freighters to easily navigate into the nation's interior and increase agricultural and manufacturing opportunities. As the world's largest hydroelectric power plant, the dam's turbines are expected to create the equivalent electricity of 18 nuclear power plants.
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