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The Chang Jiang ( Traditional Chinese: 長江, Simplified Chinese: 长江, pinyin: cháng jiāng, Wade-Giles: Ch'ang Chiang, lit. "Long River") is the longest river in Asia and the third longest in the world after the Amazon in South America and the Nile in Africa.
The river is about 6,380 km long. It has traditionally been considered a dividing point between north China and south China, although the Huang He also shares the claim.
The river is also called Yangtze River (扬子江, Yángzǐ Jiāng or Yangtze Kiang). The name Yangzi was originally used by local people only to refer to the lower reaches of the river. However, because this was the name first heard by missionaries, it has been applied in English to the entire river. The Chang Jiang is sometimes refered to as the Golden Waterway.
The Chang Jiang flows into the East China Sea. As of June 2003 the Three Gorges DamThe Three Gorges Dam (, Snxia Dab spans the Yangtze at Sandouping, Yichang, Hubei province, China. Construction began in 1994. It will be the largest hydroelectric dam in the world when completed in 2009. The reservoir began filling on June 1, 2003, and w now spans the river, flooding Fengjie , the first of a number of towns affected by the massive flood control and power generation project. The project is the largest comprehensive irrigationSahara Irrigation (in agriculture) is the replacement or supplementation of rainfall with water from another source in order to grow crops. In contrast, agriculture that relies only on direct rainfall is sometimes referred to as dryland farming. How it wo project in the world. It will free people living along the river from floods that have repeatedly threatened them in the past, and will also offer them electricityElectricity is a property of certain subatomic particles, such as electrons and protons, that gives rise to attractive and repulsive forces between them. It is one of the four fundamental forces of nature, and is a conserved property of matter that can be and water transport - though at the expense of permanently flooding many existing towns and causing large-scale changes in local ecologyEcology is the branch of science that studies the distribution and abundance of living organisms, and the interactions between organisms and their environment. The environment of an organism includes both its physical habitat, which can be described as th.
The river is the sole habitat of the critically endangered Chinese River Dolphin and Chinese paddlefish.
The river is a major transportation artery for China connecting the interior with the coast. River traffic includes commercial traffic transporting bulk goods such as coal as well as manufactured goods and passengers. River cruises of several days duration especially through the beautiful and scenic Three Gorges area are becoming popular as a tourism industry grows in China.