China is as big as the whole of Europe with 3,000 miles (5,000 km) from east to west and 3,400 miles (5,500 km) from north to south, a total of 3,657,765 square miles (9,700,000 km2): China stretches over four time-belts, and in terms of latitude, it stretches from Denmark to Hoggar. It is a world in itself, the Chinese subcontinent is inhabited by 1.3 billion people, representing a quarter of all humanity.
Roughly speaking, China can be split into East China, which consists mainly of plains and hills, with a relatively humid climate, the home of the traditional peasantry, and West or Inland China, comprises of dry, thinly populated plateau and mountains, it is the home of the ethnic minorities.
Four large regions fill this part; from north to south, they are:
The North East China, a fertile sedimentary basin, where the soil is mainly black or chernozem. It is surrounded by mountains, cutting it off from the neighboring regions: Separated by the Great Khingan Mountains to the west from Inner Mongolia, to the North Slope down to the River Amur is the Little Khingan Mountains and the Changbai Shan Mountains lying eastwards along the Korean frontier. The Manchurian sedimentary gulf is narrow to the south where it gives on to the Bohai (formerly the Gulf of Chihli) and grows wider to the north; the northern part is unfortunately the part where the climate is coldest and most unfavorable to agriculture.
Huang He embraces the provinces of He bei, Shan dong, Henan and Anhui. This vast plain is half as big as France, comprises of loess and fertile alluvium. The rocky mass of the Shan dong Mountains (18,000 feet) rises out of the plain to the east.
These plateaus are extensions continuing eastwards, which is made of hardened loess, sometimes several hundreds of feet thick; loess has been re-modeled by water and has a tabular structure broken here and there by faults (the Taiyuan basin) or by the passage cut through by the Huang He.
This region begins south of the Qinling Mountains and the River Huai: a profusion of hills and valleys lie beyond the Yang Zi; some of the hills are over 3,000 feet high. The Red Basin, lying at an altitude of about 1,300 feet, forms an enclave among the mountains. To the south-west stretch the limestone plateaus of Guangxi and Yunnan, continued by the mountains of Burma, Laos and Tong King.
This inland part of China is made up of mountain ranges and highlands which are among the highest in the world, beset by dry, cold erosion: it is an area of naked landscapes of sand and stones.
The Roof of the World, covers an area of 228,000 square miles (600,000 km2) its altitude is 16,000 feet or more. Tibet is a series of mountain chains and depressions lying from east to west, rather than a plateau. To the north, the Kunlun and Altyn Tagh ranges stand between it and Xin Jiang; the Karakorum on the other hand is an extension of them stretching westwards to Kashmir. The impressive barrier of the Himalayas rises to the south, dominated by Mount Chomolungma (Everest), about 26,000 feet high. Valleys are few and usually inhospitable, as they often follow a zigzag pattern, lying at the bottom of impassible gorges (upper reaches of the Indus and the Brahmaputra Tsangpo in Tibetan).
The Sichuan Alps which rise to 20,000 ft. are the extension of the folds forming the Himalayas, which change direction slightly, and run south-eastwards: row upon row of sharp ridges, with narrow, precipitous valleys lying between them, up to 10,000 feet deep. These gashes through the mountains, accommodating the Salween, the Mekong, and the upper Yang zi, represent an almost insurmountable obstacle to communication between east and west.
The Xinjiang Basin is in fact double,there are two depressions separated by a mountain ridge in the middle: the celestial mountains (Tian Shan) are 12,000 feet high and predominated by faulted structure in this area; and the Tian Shan are an enormous horst, like a block which has been tilted, with the strange, steep Turfan depression hollowed out of the heart of it (470 feet below sea level). The Dzungaria basin is north of the mountains and only 800 feet above sea level, throughout the centuries, it has always been the route taken by invaders and merchants. The huge Tarim basin lies to the south, with the River Tarim flowing through it into the Lob Nor; it was in this region of endless desert that the Croisiere Jaune, the Citroen expedition, got into difficulties in 1930s.
On the north of the Huang He, constitutes Inner Mongolia. It is a sandy plain with dunes formed by the wind, broken here and there by stony plateau, such as the Nan Shan along the southern edge. It is fairly high and its altitude varies between 3,000 and 4,500 ft.
As the whole, the land slopes from west to east, is borne out by the fact that the continent is drained by rivers emptying into the China Sea. Plateaus fall away step by step towards the sea, without coming across any obstacles in the way of mountain chains lying in a north south direction
Another distinction exists, is the one between North and South China. The contrast between the two is traditionally brought out by a cross-section of the country, and is reinforced by differences of climate: North China is mainly of tabular structure, which makes communications easy and frequent; it is evenly and densely populated, and the coast line is often flat (except for Shandong). South China, on the other hand, is made up of countless hills and valleys, making circulation difficult, and has for many years sheltered the aboriginal races; its rocky, deeply indented coastline encourages a life based on the sea. The border between the two is roughly the Huai valley (where banana and orange trees do not grow on the northern bank) while, the west of China forms a territory to itself, the arid China
China has only three great river systems: the Huang He, the Yang Zi and the Xi Jiang. The others are minute (the coastal rivers in Fujian); else they flow out of Chinese territory (the Salween, the Mekong, the Red River in the south, the Sungari in the north, and the lli in the west). The phenomenon of inland drainage affects most of the desert areas of China: rivers are rare and unable to reach the sea; they drain away into the sand or into closed basins, where they form lakes known as Nor (Lob Nor, Khou Nor, etc).
The Huang He is over 3000 miles long, rises in Tibet and waters a basin which is twice as big as France. Its discharge is middling, with a flow of 3000 cu. m. per sec. (as compared with the Congo: 60,000 cu. m. per sec, or even the Volga: 8000 cu. m. per sec.). This is explained by the mediocre rainfall in the areas through which it flows, and by loss due to evaporation and infiltration. The regime of the Yellow River is very irregular: high waters occur in autumn (rain) or in spring (melted snow from the upper reaches). The Yellow River carries large amounts of silt and the bed is constantly rising. The position of the mouth of the Yellow River has changed 26 times in 3000 years; sometimes it is to the north, or to the south of Shandong. When the river is low, the flow is sometimes less than 150 cu. m. per sec., which makes regular irrigation impossible.
The Blue River, as it was incorrectly called by Westerners, is a slightly longer than the Yellow River: 3,494 miles. The Chinese never call it the Blue River, and its water is often full of silt. Its catchment basin covers 714,000 square miles and includes numerous tributaries, unlike the Yellow River, which is more solitary. As a result of the tributaries and of the more generous rain the discharge of the Yang Zi is ten times that of the Yellow River: it has a flow of 30,000 cubic meters per second, which earns it third place among the rivers of the world, after the Amazon and the Congo. Even in the winter, the river is never very low, and at high water in the summer, it never has a flow of less than 80,000 cu m per sec. Its size is less striking than in the case of the Huang He, partly because of the Lakes Poyang and Dongting, which regulate and absorb some of the excess when the river is high. Even so, disastrous floods have been known, such as the l93l catastrophe when an area the size of Great Britain was flooded, and 3 million people died. Yang Zi delta moves forward about 60 feet a year. The Yang Zi is used for irrigation and is also highly navigable. Sea-going boats go as far upstream as Wuhan.
The Western River is much shorter than the other two, as it measures only 1650 miles. Its basin is almost as large as Spain and its flow is three times that of the Yellow River. The reason for this is that monsoon rains are particularly plentiful in this area of southern China. It is not surprising, therefore, to find that sometimes the rise of the river can be compared with the Yang Zi. It is called Western River because of its position compared with the Bei Jiang and the Dong Jiang, which like it are both tributaries of the Canton River. It should be remembered that rivers are of immense importance in the agricultural life and in the history of China in general. The need for an organized watch on the dykes and for a collective effort to maintain the irrigation canal system resulted in the appearance of politically centralized states very early on the middle Yellow River basin or on the lower reaches of the Yang Zi.
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