YANG - TZE - KIANG is tbe largest of the Chinese rivers. The entrance is very wide, but divided into two channels by the large island of Tsung-Min on the north. On the shore of its southern entrance is the town of Wosung. The Yang-tze-kiaug river is called by the Chinese the Great River, also the Girdle of China; it traverses the whole of the centre of the empire, rolling its flood of water to the sea through the richest and most fertile part of the country. There is no river in the world which has on its banks so numerous a population, amounting at least to 100,000,000 of people, who are sustained by its waters in the pursuits of commerce and agri culture. There are more than 100 cities of the first, second, and third classes, and 200 towns and villages, which could be approached directly from its water-way. From its origin in Tibet to its outlet at the sea, its course is about 3000 nines, the points being distant in a direct line 1850 miles, and the basin drained by its channel nearly 800,000 square miles. Persons engaged in every variety of trade resort to Hankow, from Mongolia to Tibet and Sze-chuen, bring their wheat, rice, dried and salted vegetables of every kind, bamboo sprouts, horses, sheep, furs, skins, coal, lead, jade or nephrite, gold in large quantities, rhnbarb, musk, wax, and various drugs of northern growth. Unlike the Ganges, the whole volume of water does not lose itself in tidal creeks, but pours out into the Pacific in one vast stream 60 miles wide. By a ship which has once made the trip pilots are not required. Rising in the snows of Konen Lun, it enters China proper not 300 miles from Saddiya in the province of Assam. Up to this point it is believed to be navigable by boats, for vast rafts of timber laden with bill produce pass down. Down the 1100 miles from I-Chang to Shanghai, the river rolls through provinces of virgin fertility, whence proceed teas and silks, which find their way to Canton and Shanghai. The plain of the Yang-tze-kiang was the garden of China. From it there runs north to Tien-tsin the Grand Canal, up which used to float the whole supplies of Northern China. At a point higher up, the great trunk road from Pekin to Canton crosses the river.
Where the Yang-tze-kiang flows past the Poyang Lake it receives several navigable streams which run through the Black Tea districts to the west, while those from the eastward open up the Green Tea districts. The Poyang Lake and Kiu-kiang, the chief town, are the centre of an extensive network of river and canal communication. What Kiu-kiang is at this point, Hankow is still more 200 miles farther up. It stands on high banks at the junction of the Han and Yang-tze rivers, a little below the Tungting Lake. The rise and fall in the Yang-tze-kiang averages about 10 feet. The Tibetan district, the great plateau of Mid Asia, is centrical ethnically as well as geograph ically to all S.E. Asia and to Asianesia, abuts on the west on the eastern extremity of the primitive Iranian region, and is connected with China and all the sea basius on the east of Asia by means of the Yang-tze-kiang and the Hoang-ho.
The Yang-tze-kiang corms, with tbe Hoang-ho, a twin basin, to which the most advanced and powerful eastern civilisation owes its develop ment. The Yang-tze-kiang is connected on the mst with the twin basins of the Salwin and Ira mil, which are themselves connected inland with he Tibetan district, and on the S. mid E. to the ndian oceanic basin. It is undoubtedly ono of he finest rivers in the world. It takes its rise in he mountains of Tibet, and, after traversing the :oko-Nor region, enters China at the province of :an-su ; it then leaves it again to water the sandy lains at the foot of the Alechan mountains, sur ninds the country of Ortous, and, after having :atered China from south to north, and then :mu west so east, goes on to throw itself into the "(Mow Sea. The waters are pure and beautiful t their source, and only assume their yellow tint rter passing the Alechan and the Ortous. The ver rises almost always to the level of the nintry through which it flows ; and to this is to attributed the disastrous inundations which it 2casions. These floods are very fatal to China, ut they are of little consequence to the nomadic artars, who have only to strike their tents and tove off elsewhere. — - American Expedition to van, p. 166; Local Newqmpers.