The Yangtze River

Where it rises

The river rises from glacial meltwater on the slopes of the Tanggula Mountains in southern Qinghai, feeding the Ulan Moron, on the border with the Tibet Autonomous Region. The province is Qinghai; older accounts spell it "Qinhai", which is simply a misspelling, and the statute governing the river uses the correct form.

The individual source peak that circulates widely cannot be traced to any authoritative source — every route to it runs through the same handful of copied pages — so it is better described by range and province than named.

Length, and a wrong conversion that gives the game away

The accepted length is 6,300 kilometres, a figure published by the Changjiang Water Resources Commission, the Chinese basin authority, which also gives the basin area as 1.8 million square kilometres. The river reaches the sea through the East China Sea, which older accounts get right.

What they get wrong is the conversion. 6,300 kilometres is 3,915 miles. The figure of 3,938 miles that appears in older accounts is arithmetically wrong, and it is a useful thing to recognise, because it recurs verbatim across a great many pages that have copied one another. A wrong conversion travels further than a wrong fact.

Eleven provincial-level divisions, and not all of them provinces

Older accounts say the river passes six provinces, "including Tibet, Jiangsu and Shanghai". That is wrong three times over, and the correct version is a matter of law rather than opinion.

The Yangtze River Protection Law, adopted on 26 December 2020 and in force from 1 March 2021, defines the basin in its second article as covering eleven provincial-level divisions in full. Eight are provinces — Qinghai, Sichuan, Yunnan, Hubei, Hunan, Jiangxi, Anhui and Jiangsu. One is an autonomous region, the Tibet Autonomous Region. Two are municipalities under central government, Chongqing and Shanghai. County-level areas in eight further divisions are also included. So Shanghai is not a province, and neither is Chongqing, and Tibet is not one either.

Two cautions on that figure. It describes the basin as the statute defines it, not a count of divisions the main channel physically crosses — a standard reference work gives ten provinces or regions traversed or bordered, on a different basis, and both numbers are defensible for what they measure. And on Tibet specifically: the basin includes the Tibet Autonomous Region and the river rises in Qinghai close to the Tibetan border, but the claim that the channel runs through Tibet cannot be supported, and "borders" is the furthest the evidence reaches.

The three gorges, and where they start

The Three Gorges run roughly 200 kilometres between eastern Sichuan and western Hubei. Individually, Qutang is the shortest at about 8 kilometres and Wu the middle one at about 50, running through the Wushan mountains — UNESCO spells it Wuxia. Xiling is the longest, and its length is given very differently by different sources, from about 34 kilometres in one standard reference to 66 in others; the discrepancy is wide enough that no single figure should be stated flatly. UNESCO's designated stretch runs about 193 kilometres, from Baidicheng in Fengjie County, Chongqing, to Nanjin Pass at Yichang in Hubei.

That definition settles a confusion in older accounts, which present Kuimen, the Kui Gate, and Qutang Gorge as two separate sights in sequence, the gorge lying "just down river". Kuimen is not upstream of Qutang Gorge. It is the entrance to it — the point where the river passes between Chijia and Baiyan mountains, immediately downstream of Baidicheng, which is the upstream end of the whole designated area rather than a waypoint before it.

Those accounts also place Baidicheng "not far from Chongqing". It sits about eight kilometres east of the Fengjie county seat, a long way down the reservoir from the city, and the phrase should go.

The rapids are gone

This is the largest single error, and it is confirmed from three directions, two of them official.

The United States Geological Survey reported in 2008 that the Qutang, Wu and Xiling gorges would be flooded, that the rapids would disappear, and that the gorge's treacherous twists and turns would be moderated, improving navigation. The Chinese account agrees in the past tense: the Chuanjiang waterway from Yichang to Chongqing "was once a 'heavy danger' because of its irregular channel and hundreds of rapids, which caused many shipwrecks" — and safe round-the-clock navigation now follows from the higher water level and the wider channel. A standard reference work describes Qutang as having had many rapids and eddies prior to its inundation.

So the passage in older accounts assuring a traveller that they need not fear the fate of those who once rode through this stretch is obsolete twice over. The hazard has gone — but because the water is between thirty and a hundred and ten metres deeper, not because the boats got better.

What is still there

It would be easy to overcorrect, and worth not doing. The gorges have not been erased. The river is wider and the mountains look lower, but the mountains still tower above it and the cliffs are still the view.

The scale of what changed can be put in numbers. Before the reservoir filled, the walls rose roughly 400 to 600 metres above the water. A standard reference work states that the reservoir has substantially reduced that apparent height — the rock did not move, but something close to a third of the drop from skyline to water is underwater.

The water moves thirty metres up and down

This is the most practically useful thing to know, and no older account mentions it.

The reservoir is held at 175 metres in winter and drawn down to 145 metres for the summer flood season. The thirty-metre band between those two levels is underwater in winter and exposed in summer. A summer visitor sees a river about thirty metres lower with a broad strip of bare bank above it; a winter visitor sees the reservoir full and that strip submerged. The same stretch genuinely looks different by season, and anyone comparing photographs is probably comparing months rather than years.

One qualification: these are the design operating levels, set out in a 2008 survey report, and no later official restatement of them was traced.

Baidicheng, Shibaozhai and the tributaries

Baidicheng became an island when the reservoir rose. Many of its older structures went under, new buildings were put up higher, and it is reached by a bridge to the north bank. The sourcing for this is weaker than for the engineering facts above, so it is given as reported rather than as established — but it is the clearest illustration available of what the reservoir did to a named monument.

Shibaozhai and its pavilion are on the route, and the date older accounts give for it — a twelve-storey temple built in 1650 — is certainly wrong. The better dating available attributes the nine-storey pavilion to the nineteenth century, a three-storey pavilion at the top to the mid-nineteenth, and three further storeys to the 1950s, which is where twelve comes from; but none of that reaches a standard worth printing as fact, so the building is best left undated. What is reported is more useful anyway: a protective structure was built around the site in 2005 as the water rose, and it reopened to visitors in 2009.

The Daning River, visited from the main channel at Wushan, is a real tributary. The adjective "clear" that older accounts attach to it cannot be verified, and there is reason for doubt: the reservoir's backwater backed up and expanded the tributaries well upstream, so the water in them is not what it was. Within Wu Gorge, the Twelve Peaks and the Goddess Peak appear only in commercial material rather than in official or scholarly sources, and should be treated as local naming rather than documented fact.

The wildlife, which is the real story and is mostly bad

Older accounts promise "a variety of wildlife" and leave it there. The actual position is far more striking, and four of the five animals worth naming are in a worse state than endangered.

The baiji, the Yangtze river dolphin, is functionally extinct. A six-week visual and acoustic survey in 2006 covering its historical range in the main channel found no evidence that the species survives; interview surveys in 27 fishing communities two years later found little either. The last confirmed sighting was in May 2002, photographed in the Tongling reach; the previous survey, in the 1990s, had found thirteen animals. The IUCN's cetacean specialists call it the first documented global extinction of a megafaunal vertebrate in over fifty years, and with it the loss of an entire mammal family.

A reassessment published in July 2022 moved two more. The Chinese paddlefish was declared Extinct. The Yangtze sturgeon was moved to Extinct in the Wild — fish still caught come from restocking, and no natural reproduction had been observed in twenty years. The Chinese sturgeon remains Critically Endangered, and one figure conveys why: genetic work found only 22 individuals, eleven males and eleven females, in the last recorded natural spawning, in 2015.

The Yangtze finless porpoise is the one piece of good news. It is critically endangered and under the highest level of state protection, but the population rose from 1,012 in the 2017 survey to about 1,249 in 2022 — the first rebound since monitoring began, credited to a ten-year fishing ban and to the Protection Law. One distinction is worth keeping straight, because it is easy to get wrong: the critically endangered listing applies to the Yangtze subspecies, while the species as a whole was assessed as Vulnerable in 2011.

The dam, and entering China

The reservoir behind the Three Gorges Dam is the reason almost everything above has changed, and the dam has a page of its own; the short version is that it was accepted as complete on 1 November 2020, has been generating since 2003, and submerged two cities, eleven counties and a hundred and sixteen towns along with the three gorges themselves.

On entry, one date governs everything. British citizens holding standard passports could enter mainland China visa-free for stays of up to thirty days until the end of December 2026, for tourism, business, visiting family or friends, and transit; longer stays, paid work, study and journalism need a visa arranged in advance, and no extension beyond 2026 has been announced. Place of residence must be registered with the local public security bureau within twenty-four hours of arrival, which hotels and river vessels normally handle on arrival.