China’s Main Rivers:

The Yellow River and the Yangtze

Objective: By the end of today’s lesson you should

be able to list the two major rivers in China, as well as their importance.

China’s GeographyYellow River

• The two major rivers of China are the Yellow River: Huang He and the Yangtze River: Chang Jiang.– The Huang He, or Yellow River, gets its

name from the rich yellow soil it carries as it flows across China.

– It was also called “China’s sorrow” because when it over-flooded, many people drowned and homes were destroyed.

– It helped make the soil fertile by leaving behind a rich layer of topsoil.

Residents survey the damage to houses that collapsed during the flooding in Guangan.

China’s Geography

Yangtze River

• The Chang Jiang or Yangtze River also brings rich topsoil to it’s river valley which helped in farming.

• Outside it’s river valleys, only one-tenth of China’s land can be farmed because mountains and deserts cover most of it’s land.

• The Himalaya close off China to the southwest.

• The Kunlun Shan and Tian Shan Mountains close off China’s western border.

• The Gobi Desert spreads east from the mountains.

China’s Geography• Mountains and deserts

shaped Chinese history because they were like a wall which separated China from most other people.

What other civilization have we talked about that was separated from other countries?India

• China’s first civilization developed along the Huang He (Yellow) River Valley.

• Over time the Chinese people united and created a homeland they called “The Middle Kingdom” which they believed was the world’s center.

• The Chinese developed a unique way of life that lasted into modern times.

- Early Chinese writing used pictographs and ideographs.- Pictographs are characters that stand for objects.- Ideographs join two or more pictographs to represent an idea.- Most Chinese characters represent whole words.

The Chinese Language