Yangtze River

Cultural  

1. River in China, flowing from the highlands of Tibet in western China generally eastward through central China and emptying into the Pacific Ocean at Shanghai.

---

Discover More

At about four thousand miles, it is the longest river of China and of Asia.

Also called the Chang.

A major east-west trade and transportation route in China.

Example Sentences

A refugee from the Sino-Japanese War who fled mainland China to Hong Kong, he started a business in 1950 manufacturing plastic flowers and named it Cheung Kong after China's Yangtze River.

From Barron's • Jan. 30, 2026

China’s advantage lies in the scale of its ambition, not only in the nation’s brainy tech hubs but also in areas such as Jingzhou, a city of five million people on the Yangtze River.

From The Wall Street Journal • Nov. 25, 2025

They focused on the Yangtze River Delta and Pearl River Delta, two areas that are home to several megacities and key industrial zones.

From Science Daily • Oct. 23, 2025

Andrew Law, a sociologist at Newcastle University in the U.K., has used lidar mapping to digitally preserve structures along China’s Yangtze River that were threatened or wiped out by extensive damming.

From Slate • Jul. 25, 2025

Some or all of these centers may actually comprise several nearby centers where food production arose more or less independently, such as North China’s Yellow River valley and South China’s Yangtze River valley.

From "Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies" by Jared M. Diamond