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CHINA: YANGTZE RIVER CRUISE
YANGTZE RIVER CRUISE
THE RIVER:
The Yangtze is China's greatest river and a historic transport route. This is a huge river; it is over 6,000 km (nearly 4000 miles) long, about the same as the Mississippi. Only the Amazon and Nile are longer. It is the world's fifth largest river by volume of water discharged, at over 30,000 cubic meters a second, roughly double the Mississippi or Mekong, three times the Saint Lawrence, four times the Danube or Columbia, and more than ten times little streams like the Rhine or Nile. The Yangtze has been an important transportation route with major cities along its banks for several thousand years. What we now call Chinese civilization first developed a grain-based agriculture along the Yellow River (Huang He), but different peoples cultivated rice beside the lower Yangtze. These peoples were eventually conquered by Shi Huangdi and assimilated during the Han Dynasty, giving the Chinese (汉人, Hanren) their native name for their ethnicity. Owing to the Yangtze's ease of navigation and much less common floods, as well as millennia of invasion from northern nomads, the shores of the Yangtze became home to many major Chinese cities and numerous capitals, most notably Nanjing.
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