River Cruises On The Mighty Yangtze River

Few river cruises anywhere in the world will ever be able to match the pure sense of adrenalin-rushing adventure offered by a trip down the mighty Yangtze River in China. The river is as immense, impressive and exciting as the country itself. Epic barely describes it!

The river is just one of several must-see attractions China's vast hinterland has to offer the visitor. Others that immediately spring to mind include the Great Wall of China, the Terracotta Warriors of Xi'an, and the Forbidden City, the Chinese imperial palace from the Ming Dynasty located in the middle of Beijing, China's exciting capital.

The beauty and contrasts of the Yangtze River are surely without parallel and encapsulate the picture-postcard timelessness that is both the old and the new China. The river has been used for millennia for a variety of purposes, not only as a source of water used for drinking and irrigation, but also as a means of transport and industry.

Indeed, near to the town of Sandouping, the incredible hydroelectric Three Gorges Dam, built to tame and to harness the power of the river, is the largest power station in the world. The project is simply awe inspiring and has reduced the danger of catastrophic flooding dramatically. Now floods, such as the flood in 1954, which claimed the lives of some 33,000 people, and forced over 18 million people to move, are expected to be a thing of the past.

Statistics for the river, in a sense, speak for themselves. It flows for about four thousand miles - something like a thousand miles of which is navigable by ships and thus ideal for river cruises - making it the largest river in Asia, and the third longest in the world. The Yangtze begins life in the Tibetan Plateau and flows eastwards before emptying in the East China Sea at Shanghai.

The Great Wall of China is not one wall, but a collection of walls, measuring about 5,500 miles in total. Just under 3,900 miles of it is made up of actual walls, with bricks and stones used as well as other materials. Nearly 1,400 miles consists of natural barriers, such as rivers and hills, while the rest, about 200 miles, is made up of trenches.

There are many myths surrounding the Great Wall of China which was built to protect the country's northern border from attack. Work began at around the 5th century BC and continued off and on until the 16th century. Can it actually be seen from space, one of the most popular and enduring of the myths? The consensus seems to be no, not even from low earth orbit.

The Terracotta Warriors, often called the eighth wonder of the ancient world, consist of over 8,000 life-size clay warriors protecting the nearby tomb of the first Emperor of China, Qin Shi Huang. They were discovered in 1974 in Xi'an, the capital of Shaanxi Province, by a group of farmers digging a well for water. It is often said no one can claim to have visited China unless they've seen the Terracotta Warriors!

In the middle of Beijing lies the Forbidden City, built over a 14-year period from 1406, and now housing the Palace Museum. For nearly half a millennium, the Forbidden City's 980 buildings served as the home of China's emperors and was the ceremonial and political heart of the nation.