Nearly 4,000 miles long, the Yangtze has watered civilizations for millennia—and laid waste to them too. The eighth-century poet Li Bai wrote that navigating the river was "even harder than ...

Author Ryunosuke Akutagawa (1892-1927) observed that, “The Yangtze River is wide, but it is not a sea,” in his “Choko Yuuki” (Travels on the Yangtze) when he traveled up this river ...