Yangtze

• 1. Introduction

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  The Yangtze River rises at Jari Hill, in the Tanggula Mountains of the Tibetan Plateau, and runs 6,236 kilometers to the East China Sea. It is the longest river in China and the third-longest in the world. Its drainage basin covers one-fifth of the land area of China. Nearly one-third of the country's population lives within that basin. The river has carried water, war, salt, and steamships. It once held a dolphin found nowhere else on Earth, a creature whose lineage stretched back seventy million years. What does it mean for a single waterway to shape a civilization, drown millions, and then lose its own oldest inhabitants? The Yangtze answers in geology, in language, in flood records, and in the iron barrier of a dam. These are the threads this documentary follows.

• 2. A River Of Many Names

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  Cháng Jiāng, meaning Long River, is what the Yangtze is called in Chinese, yet the English name comes from somewhere else entirely. In Old Chinese the river was simply Jiang, written with the water radical joined to a homophone pronounced gōng. That word, kong, was probably Austroasiatic, spoken by local peoples such as the Yue, and it relates to the modern Vietnamese sông and the Khmer krung. By the Han dynasty, Jiāng had come to mean any river, so the Yangtze was distinguished as the Great River, Dàjiāng. The epithet meaning long was first formally applied during the Six Dynasties period.

  Yángzǐ Jiāng, the local name for the Lower Yangtze around Yangzhou, gave the West its word. The name likely came from an ancient ferry crossing called Yángzǐ. Europeans arriving in the delta applied this single regional name to the entire river. Marco Polo called it Quian, and it appeared on the earliest English maps as Kian or Kiam, standardizing as Kiang by the mid-19th century. An 18th-century name, Blue River, fell out of favor partly for the irony of attaching it to such a muddy waterway.

  Matteo Ricci's 1615 Latin account described the Iansu and Iansuchian, and translated the name as Fils de la Mer, Son of the Ocean. By 1800, cartographers such as Aaron Arrowsmith wrote Yang-tse. The British diplomat Thomas Wade emended it to Yang-tzu Chiang in his romanization first published in 1867. The spelling Yangtze was a compromise reached at the 1906 Imperial Postal Conference in Shanghai. Hanyu Pinyin, adopted in 1958, gave the alternative Yangzi, used in English after the United States normalized relations with the PRC in 1979.

• 3. From Glacier To Estuary

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  Geladandong Mountain holds the source the Chinese government traditionally recognized, the Tuotuo tributary at the base of a glacier, sitting at 5,342 meters above sea level. It is the highest source though not the furthest. The true hydrological source, discovered only in the late 20th century, lies at Jari Hill at the head of the Dam Qu tributary, about 365 kilometers southeast of Geladandong, in wetlands 5,170 meters up near Chadan Township in Zadoi County. The Geladandong source remains the historical spiritual source, and is still commonly called the source of the Yangtze.

  Over its first 2,600 kilometers, the river falls more than 5,200 meters, dropping from above 5,000 meters to less than 1,000 as it carves a deep valley at the border of Sichuan and Tibet. It enters the Sichuan basin at Yibin, gathers large tributaries, then cuts through Mount Wushan to create the famous Three Gorges. Yichang is the first city on the Yangtze Plain east of those gorges.

  Dongting Lake, on the border of Hunan and Hubei, drains most of the rivers of Hunan into the Yangtze. At Wuhan the river meets its biggest tributary, the Han River, carrying water from as far as Shaanxi. At the northern tip of Jiangxi, Lake Poyang, the biggest freshwater lake in China, joins the flow. Four of China's five main freshwater lakes feed the river before it reaches the East China Sea at Shanghai. Some geologists date the river's origin to about 45 million years ago in the Eocene, though that dating is disputed, and its discharge site likely postdates the late Miocene, when its headwaters once drained south toward the Gulf of Tonkin.

• 4. Cradle Of Southern China

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  Human activity in the Three Gorges area reaches back 27,000 years. By the 5th millennium BC, the lower Yangtze held the Hemudu and Majiabang cultures, among the earliest cultivators of rice. The successor Liangzhu culture, by the 3rd millennium BC, showed influence from the Longshan peoples of the North China Plain. Northerners regarded the Yue people of the lower Yangtze as barbarous, noting they blackened their teeth, cut their hair short, tattooed their bodies, and lived in small settlements among bamboo groves.

  Gouwu in southern Jiangsu and Yuyue in northern Zhejiang absorbed growing Zhou influence from the 9th century BC. As the kingdoms of Wu and Yue, they became famed as fishers, shipwrights, and sword-smiths, among the most powerful states of the later Zhou. The middle Yangtze state of Jing began in the upper Han River valley, then adapted to native culture and changed its name to Chu. Wu sacked Chu's capital Ying in 506 BC. In 473 BC, King Goujian of Yue annexed Wu and moved his court to modern Suzhou. In 333 BC, Chu annexed Yue, whose royal family was said to flee south to found the Minyue kingdom in Fujian.

  Qin subdued Ba and Shu on the upper Yangtze, then conquered the central Yangtze, the heartland of Chu, in 278 BC. Since the Han dynasty the region grew ever more important to China's economy. Irrigation works, the most famous being Dujiangyan northwest of Chengdu, made agriculture stable enough to exceed even the Yellow River region. By the Song dynasty the lower reaches were among the wealthiest parts of the country. The Grand Canal tied the lower Yangtze to Beijing, and the ancient Lingqu Canal linked the basin to the Pearl River Delta.

• 5. The Backbone Of Trade

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  Nanjing served as the capital of China several times, though usually for governments holding only the southeast, including the Wu kingdom of the Three Kingdoms period and the Eastern Jin Dynasty. The Ming ruled most of China from Nanjing before moving the capital to Beijing. The Nationalist government sat at Nanjing in 1927 to 1937 and again in 1945 to 1949. The river itself served repeatedly as the political boundary between north and south China, because crossing it was difficult, as during the Southern and Northern Dynasties and the Southern Song.

  The Battle of Red Cliffs in 208 AD, during the Three Kingdoms period, is the most famous of the many battles fought along the river. During the Jin-Song wars, the Battle of Caishi of 1161 saw the fleet of the Jin emperor Wanyan Liang clash with the Song. Song soldiers fired bombs of lime and sulfur from trebuchets at the Jurchen warships. The Song victory halted the invasion, and the Battle of Tangdao followed the same year.

  The Jardine, the first steamship to sail the river, was built for the British firm Jardine, Matheson and Co. in 1835. The acting Viceroy of Liangguang warned she would be fired on, and on her first trial run from Lintin Island the forts at the Bogue opened fire and forced her back. Lord Palmerston, the Foreign Secretary, decided largely on the suggestions of William Jardine to declare war on China, beginning the first of the Opium Wars in mid-1840. The China Navigation Company, founded in London in 1876, traded up the Yangtze from its Shanghai base, and began a regular service to Australia in 1883.

• 6. Conquering The Gorges

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  Seventy to eighty trackers, men hitched to hawsers, physically pulled junks upriver through the deadliest sections of the Three Gorges. Steamers came late to the upper river between Yichang and Chongqing, where Himalayan snowmelt created treacherous seasonal currents and a passage described as the narrow throat of an hourglass. Chongqing sits 700 to 800 feet above sea level, demanding powerful engines for the climb. Archibald John Little took an interest after the 1876 Chefoo Convention opened Chongqing to consular residence once steamships could ascend that far.

  Little built Leechuan to tackle the gorges in 1898, and in March it reached Chongqing, though only with the help of trackers. He then persuaded Captain Samuel Cornell Plant, fresh from navigating Persia's Upper Karun River, to assess the route. With Plant's design input, Little had SS Pioneer built with Plant in command. In June 1900, Plant became the first to pilot a merchant steamer up the Upper Yangtze from Yichang to Chongqing. Pioneer was sold to the Royal Navy and renamed HMS Kinsha. Germany's SS Suixing hit a rock and sank on its maiden voyage that year, killing its captain.

  In 1908, Sichuan merchants and their government formed the Sichuan Steam Navigation Company with Plant, the first successful service between Yichang and Chongqing, running his ships SS Shutung and SS Shuhun. Appointed First Senior River Inspector by the Chinese Maritime Customs Service in 1915, Plant installed navigational marks, established signaling systems, and wrote a detailed handbook on the Ichang-Chungking section. He trained hundreds of pilots and, in 1917, removed some of the worst obstacles with explosives.

  Captain Plant died at sea in 1921 while returning to England. A Plant Memorial Fund drew contributions from the largest shipping companies, including Butterfield and Swire, Jardine Matheson, and Standard Oil, alongside Chinese pilots. In 1924, a 50-foot granite obelisk was erected at Xintan, inscribed in Chinese on one face and English on another. Relocated to higher ground ahead of the Three Gorges Dam, it still stands near Yichang. Standard Oil's tankers Mei Ping, Mei An, and Mei Hsia were destroyed on the 12th of December 1937, when Japanese warplanes bombed and sank the U.S.S. Panay.

• 7. The Floods

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  Tens of millions of people live in the floodplain of the Yangtze valley, an area that floods every summer and is habitable only behind river dikes. The 1931 Central China floods are generally considered among the deadliest natural disasters ever recorded. Estimates of the death toll range from 145,000 to between 3.7 million and 4 million. The river flooded again in 1935 with great loss of life.

  From June to September 1954, catastrophic floods struck mostly in Hubei Province after an extraordinarily long rainy season. Despite efforts to open three flood gates and divert the water, the level hit a historic high of 44.67 meters in Jingzhou and 29.73 meters in Wuhan. The dead were estimated at 33,000, including those who died of plague in the aftermath.

  The 1998 Yangtze River floods lasted from mid-June to early September. They left 3,704 dead, 15 million homeless, and 26 billion dollars in economic loss, with other sources reporting 4,150 dead and 180 million people affected. The 2016 China floods caused 22 billion dollars in damages. In 2020 the river saw the heaviest rainfall since 1961, a 79 percent increase in June and July over the average for the period across the previous 41 years. A new theory linked the intense downpours to an abrupt reduction in greenhouse gas and aerosol emissions during COVID-19 pandemic shutdowns, which reversed a decades-long decline in rainfall caused by rising aerosols.

• 8. Vanishing Life

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  In December 2006, the Yangtze river dolphin, the baiji, was declared functionally extinct after an extensive search revealed no sign of it. Baijis were the last surviving species of a large lineage dating back seventy million years, one of only six species of freshwater dolphins. The Yangtze basin holds 416 known fish species, 178 of them endemic, making it by far the most species-rich river in China; the Pearl River has almost 300 and the Yellow River 160. The upper reach above Yichang alone holds 279 species, including 147 endemics.

  Dams compound the loss. Beginning in the 1950s, dams and dikes cut more than a hundred lakes off from the main river, and as farmers encroached, gates could not be opened during floods, so lakes dried up. Baidang Lake shrank from 100 square kilometers in the 1950s to 40 in 2005. The Three Gorges Dam created an impassable iron barrier, and in September 2012 the river near Chongqing turned red from pollution. The Chinese paddlefish, last definitely recorded near Yibin in 2003, is now found by recent reviews to be extinct, and reputedly reached as much as 7 meters. The Chinese sturgeon, the largest fish in the river at 5 meters, is critically endangered.

  The Yangtze produces more ocean plastic pollution than any other river, according to The Ocean Cleanup. In 2002 a pilot program began reconnecting lakes to the river. The first, reconnected in 2004, were Zhangdu, Honghu, and Tian'e-Zhou in Hubei, followed by Baidang in 2005. Reconnection improved water quality, let fish migrate, reduced flooding, and raised farmer incomes by 30 percent. By 2010, five provinces and Shanghai had set up 40 protected areas covering 16,500 square kilometers, and populations of 47 threatened species increased, including the critically endangered Yangtze alligator. In 2020 a sweeping law banned chemical plants within one kilometer of the river and imposed a complete fishing ban on its natural waterways. The Three Gorges Dam, the largest power station in the world by installed capacity at 22.5 gigawatts, still releases water to mimic the natural flooding that once triggered the breeding of carp downstream.