Chinese rivers, lakes and seas, found on the map

Every one on the map

Every place listed below can be asked in this game. Places you find in a passed round drop out of your remaining pool. Grouped into 7 learning regions, matching the rounds on the China guide. Regions with no places in this map’s selection are omitted. Shared rivers and seas appear in one learning group, even when they cross regional boundaries.

What the map tells you about each one

The paragraph the game shows when you find a place, for all 18 of the ones written by hand. Reading them first is not cheating.

Yangtze

The Yangtze is about 6,300 kilometers long, the longest river in Asia and the third longest in the world. Its basin holds around a third of the country’s population. The Three Gorges Dam, finished in 2012, is the largest power station on earth by capacity and its reservoir displaced over 1.3 million people.

Huang He

The Huang He is about 5,460 kilometers long and carries more silt than any other river in the world, which is what colors it and what has raised its lower bed above the surrounding plain in places. It has changed course drastically at least six times in recorded history, and its floods have killed on a scale few events anywhere have.

Xi Jiang

The Xi Jiang, the west river, is the longest arm of the Pearl River system and carries more water than the Yellow River does. Its delta is one of the most heavily built-up areas in the world, holding Guangzhou, Shenzhen, Dongguan, Foshan, Hong Kong and Macau within about a hundred kilometers.

Amur

The Amur, called the Heilong Jiang in Chinese, runs about 2,824 kilometers and is the border for roughly 1,600 kilometers of that. It is one of the longest undammed rivers in the world. Chinese and Soviet troops fought over an island in it at Zhenbao in March 1969, which brought the two countries close to war.

Songhua

The Songhua is the largest tributary of the Amur and freezes for four to five months of the year. Harbin sits on it, and the ice cut from it each winter builds the sculptures of the city’s ice festival. A chemical plant explosion upstream in 2005 sent a benzene slick down it and cut Harbin’s water supply for five days.

Mekong

The Mekong is called the Lancang inside China, where about a fifth of its length lies. Below the border it runs through Myanmar, Laos, Thailand, Cambodia and Vietnam, and its lower fisheries feed tens of millions of people, which is why the dams on the Chinese reach are a standing argument between the countries downstream.

Salween

The Salween, the Nu Jiang in Chinese, runs about 2,815 kilometers to the Andaman Sea and is one of the longest free-flowing rivers left in Asia. In northwestern Yunnan it runs within about 20 kilometers of the Mekong, separated by a single ridge, in the gorges that make up the Three Parallel Rivers world heritage site.

Yarlung Tsangpo

The Yarlung Tsangpo runs east for some 1,700 kilometers at over 3,000 meters, then turns hard south around Namcha Barwa and drops into a gorge that is by some measures the deepest in the world, before emerging in India as the Brahmaputra. The turn is called the Great Bend.

Tarim

The Tarim is the longest river in the world that reaches no sea: it runs about 2,000 kilometers along the rim of the Taklamakan and then disappears, historically into the wandering lake of Lop Nur, which has been dry since the 1970s. Everything it carries comes as meltwater off the Tian Shan and Kunlun.

Qinghai Lake

Qinghai Lake is the largest lake in the country, around 4,400 square kilometers, and sits at 3,205 meters. Nothing flows out of it, so it is salty. Bird Island on its western side is a breeding ground for bar-headed geese, which cross the Himalayas twice a year at altitudes where there is a third of the oxygen at sea level.

Poyang Lake

Poyang is the largest freshwater lake in the country and changes size enormously with the season: it can cover over 4,000 square kilometers in summer and under a thousand in winter. The mudflats it leaves are where almost the entire world population of Siberian cranes spends the winter.

Dongting Lake

Dongting is the second largest freshwater lake in the country and acts as a flood basin for the Yangtze, taking the overflow in summer. It was much larger before centuries of diking and reclamation cut it down, and the loss of that storage is part of why the floods below it have grown worse.

Lake Tai

Lake Tai is shallow, about two meters on average, and sits in the middle of the densest industrial region in the country, which is why an algal bloom in 2007 cut off drinking water to two million people in Wuxi. The eroded limestone rocks fished out of it are the scholar’s rocks of classical Chinese gardens.

Nam Co

Nam Co lies at 4,718 meters and is one of the highest large lakes in the world, frozen from about December to May. The name means sky lake in Tibetan. It is a pilgrimage site, and the full circuit of its shore is around 320 kilometers.

Bo Hai

The Bo Hai is the innermost gulf of the Yellow Sea and the only sea entirely within Chinese waters. It is shallow, averaging about 18 meters, and takes the outflow of the Yellow River, which is silting it up. It freezes at the edges most winters.

Yellow Sea

The Yellow Sea takes its name from the silt the Yellow River used to pour into it, which colors the water after a flood. It is shallow, averaging about 44 meters, and was dry land during the last ice age, when the Chinese and Korean coasts were joined.

South China Sea

The South China Sea covers about 3.5 million square kilometers and carries a third of global shipping. Its waters and the reefs in them are claimed in overlapping ways by China, Vietnam, the Philippines, Malaysia, Brunei and Taiwan, which is the longest-running maritime dispute in Asia.

Taiwan Strait

The strait is about 180 kilometers across at its narrowest and around 70 meters deep, shallow enough to have been dry land in the last ice age. It has been the busiest strait in the world for container traffic in some years, with a large share of global shipping passing through it.

How this one works

The other maps of China

Sweden has the same map in Swedish waters. Denmark has the same map in Danish waters. India has the same map in Indian waters. Mexico has the same map in Mexican waters. United States has the same map in American waters. Turkey has the same map in Turkish waters. France has the same map in French waters. Japan has the same map in Japanese waters. Germany has the same map in German waters. Spain has the same map in Spanish waters. Brazil has the same map in Brazilian waters. United Kingdom has the same map in British waters. Italy has the same map in Italian waters. South Korea has the same map in Korean waters. All three together on the China atlas page, the country itself on the China guide, and the other two hundred on the world map.