How long is the Yangtze? Length of the longest river in Asia
The Yangtze is about 6,300 km (3,915 miles) long. It is the longest river in Asia and the third in the world, and its whole course lies in China.
Lay the Yangtze over your country
The river and a country at one scale. Pick a country, drag the river or switch the globe to the Mercator map.
Yangtze: about 6,300 km (3,915 miles), about 1.6 times the straight-line distance from New York to Los Angeles (about 3,940 km).
Drag the river with your finger or mouse. It moves over the globe without changing shape or length, and its north stays up. The globe keeps the true proportions; on the Mercator map you can see how a river moved north grows.
Where the Yangtze flows
The Yangtze rises in the Tanggula Mountains on the Tibetan Plateau and flows east across China to the East China Sea near Shanghai. It is the longest river in the world that flows entirely within one country.
The Yangtze basin covers about 1.81 million km². At its mouth the river carries about 30,000 m³/s of water on average, well above the Mississippi-Missouri system. The Three Gorges Dam on the Yangtze is one of the largest hydroelectric plants in the world.
Rivers of similar length, straightened
Rivers drawn at one scale. Straighten them to compare their lengths and see how they look on a Mercator map.
- Amazon: about 6,400 km, disputed up to 6,992 km
- Yangtze: about 6,300 km
- Mississippi-Missouri: about 5,971 km
On a Mercator map: about 7,300 km
On a Mercator map the Yangtze looks about 7,300 km long (×1.16 its true length). Its course lies at middle latitudes, so the map stretches it by about 16%.
Open the Mercator mapHow long is it really?
Encyclopedias give about 6,300 km. As with every long river, the result depends on which source on the Tibetan Plateau counts as the farthest and where the river ends in its wide estuary.
The line on this page's maps is about 5,287 km long, shorter than the sources say, because a 1:10 million map smooths the bends and the mouth. That is why lengths here come from the sources, not from the drawing.
Yangtze: questions and answers
The Yangtze is about 6,300 km (3,915 miles) long according to Encyclopædia Britannica and the USGS. It is the third longest river in the world after the Nile and the Amazon.
The Yangtze rises in the Tanggula Mountains on the Tibetan Plateau, in the Chinese province of Qinghai.
The Yangtze flows into the East China Sea near Shanghai.
Only China. The Yangtze is the longest river in the world that flows entirely within one country.
The Yangtze (about 6,300 km) is longer than the Yellow River (about 5,464 km). It also carries many times more water: about 30,000 m³/s against about 1,770 m³/s.