Yangtze River Basin

The Yangtze River Basin is the drainage basin of the Yangtze, the longest river in Asia at 6,236 kilometers, covering about 1,808,500 square kilometers of central and eastern China. The river rises in the Tanggula Mountains of the Tibetan Plateau in Qinghai province and flows east through Sichuan, Chongqing, Hubei, Hunan, Anhui and Jiangsu to Shanghai before reaching the East China Sea. The basin holds nearly one-third of China's population on one-fifth of the country's land area, and its delta region alone generates as much as twenty percent of China's GDP. Average discharge at the river's estuary measured about 30,146 cubic meters per second over the 1955 to 2021 period.