China's geography: three steps down from Tibet to the sea

How the land descends in three steps

Britannica divides China's surface into three levels. The highest is the Plateau of Tibet, spread across the Tibet Autonomous Region and Qinghai, with an average elevation of well over 4,000 metres; its western part, the Qiangtang, averages about 5,000 metres. The plateau covers about 2.5 million square kilometres, a little over a quarter of the country, and Everest stands on its southern rim on the border with Nepal.

The ranges around it carry nine of the fourteen peaks on Earth above 8,000 metres, either inside China or on its border. K2, at 8,611 metres, is on the border with Pakistan. The highest peak entirely within China is Shishapangma, 8,013 metres, in Nyalam County of Tibet. From those heights the land descends eastward like a terrace.

North of the Kunlun and Qilian ranges and east of the Qionglai and Daliang, the land drops sharply to a second step of basins and plateaus between about 900 and 1,800 metres. The third step runs from the Taihang, Wu and Dalou ranges and the eastern edge of the Yunnan-Guizhou Plateau to the sea, and almost all of it is hills and plains below 450 metres.

Mountains make up about 33% of the land surface, plateaus 26% and hills 10%. Plains account for 12% and basins for 19%, and those two carry most of the arable land and most of the people, although some of the largest basins are filled with desert.

Why every major river runs east

The two rivers that carried Chinese civilisation both rise on the Tibetan plateau. The Yangtze runs about 6,300 kilometres through the centre of the country, drains about 1.8 million square kilometres and reaches the East China Sea near Shanghai. Roughly 300 million people live along its middle and lower reaches. The Yellow River runs 5,464 kilometres through the north and drains 752,000 square kilometres before reaching the Bohai.

Han civilisation itself began on the southern part of the Loess Plateau, by Britannica's account, and spread outward until relief and climate stopped it. The Yellow River takes its colour and its name from loess, the wind-blown yellow soil of the Loess Plateau, which covers about 650,000 square kilometres at 1,000 to 1,500 metres. The river carries that silt onto the North China Plain and drops it, and it now flows on a raised ridge about fifty metres above the plain, held in by embankments. Floods and changes of course have recurred over the centuries, and rulers were traditionally judged by whether they kept those embankments up.

Not all the water reaches the sea. Inland drainage in the upland basins of the north and north-west accounts for 40% of the country's drainage area, and many of its rivers end in lakes or disappear into the desert. China was once estimated to have about 50,000 rivers; the current estimate is about 22,000.

The Yangtze Delta generates as much as 20% of China's GDP, and the Three Gorges Dam stands on it. Building dams and dykes since the 1950s cut more than a hundred lakes off from the main river. In December 2006 the Yangtze river dolphin was declared functionally extinct after a search found no sign of it, and in January 2020 the government imposed a ten-year fishing ban at 332 sites along the river.

Where the people actually live

The Heihe-Tengchong Line divides the country into two halves of roughly equal area, and the census figures put almost everyone on one side of it. The seventh national census of 2020 grouped the population into four regions: 39.93% lived in the east, 25.83% in the central provinces, 27.12% in the west and 6.98% in the north-east. The eastern share had grown by 2.15 percentage points since 2010 and the north-east's had fallen by 1.20.

The densest farmland is on the lowest step. The North China Plain is a triangle with Beijing, Shanghai and Yichang at its corners, fed by the Yellow and Yangtze rivers. The Sichuan Basin, ringed by mountains of 1,000 to 3,000 metres, has a floor at about 500 metres that is densely farmed and densely settled. Britannica describes it as about twice the size of Scotland and notes that it often became an independent kingdom when the central government was weak.

The Northeast China Plain opens beyond Shanhaiguan, where the mountains reach the Bohai coast, and runs north to the Greater and Lesser Hinggan ranges; the Changbai Mountains close it off from the Korean peninsula. North of Beijing the land rises onto the Inner Mongolian Plateau, between 900 and 1,500 metres, dry grassland that was traditionally pastoral. The Great Wall was built along the mountains that mark the plateau's southern edge, between the herders above and the farmers below.

Cities have taken a growing share. The census counted 63.89% of the population as urban in 2020, and the National Bureau of Statistics put the urbanisation rate of permanent residents at 67.89% at the end of 2025.

How the coast changes at Hangzhou Bay

Britannica gives the mainland coastline as some 14,000 kilometres; other compilations put it at 18,000 kilometres. The coast faces four marginal seas of the western Pacific, the Bohai, the Yellow Sea, the East China Sea and the South China Sea, and about 5,000 islands lie off it.

Hangzhou Bay divides it in two. To the south the coast is rocky and indented with harbours and offshore islands. To the north, except along the Shandong and Liaodong peninsulas, it is sandy and flat, built of the silt the rivers bring down.

The south-west has its own surface. The Yunnan-Guizhou Plateau, averaging about 2,000 metres, is limestone karst, and UNESCO inscribed the South China Karst as a natural World Heritage property in 2007 and extended it in 2014.

How the monsoon divides the year

The climate runs from tropical in the far south to subarctic in the far north and alpine on the plateau, and the monsoon organises all of it. In summer the East Asian monsoon carries warm, moist air from the south and delivers most of the year's rain; in winter the Siberian anticyclone brings cold, dry air down from the north. The north-western deserts receive as little as 50 millimetres of rain a year, while much of the south exceeds 1,000.

The Qinling Mountains, the eastern continuation of the Kunlun, divide the North China Plain from the Yangtze lowlands. The line is a cultural boundary as well as a physical one: rice dominates south of it, wheat and maize north of it. Eastern China supports two or three harvests a year, and south of the Nanling range the tropical climate allows two crops of rice.

Typhoons reached China ten times in 2025. The National Bureau of Statistics recorded an average temperature of 10.9°C for the year, unchanged from 2024.

What fills the north-west

North-west of the plateau, between the Kunlun and the Tian Shan, lies the Tarim Basin of Xinjiang, about 1,500 kilometres from east to west and 600 from north to south at its widest, with the Taklamakan Desert at its centre. To the east it falls into the Turpan Depression, where the dry bed of Lake Ayding has recorded temperatures of 49.6°C. North of the Tian Shan the Junggar Basin holds the Gurbantünggüt Desert, enclosed on the north by the Altay Mountains along the borders with Russia and Mongolia. The Tarim is linked to the rest of China only by the Hexi Corridor, and Britannica notes that only three dynasties, the Han, the Tang and the Qing, were able to hold it; when the centre was weak, oasis states formed there.

Further east, the Qaidam Basin of northern Qinghai lies at 2,600 to 3,000 metres among brackish and salt lakes, and the Hexi Corridor of Gansu runs between the Qilian Mountains and the Gobi. Britannica explains the corridor's place in history by its water: meltwater from the Qilian made oasis farming possible along a strip with the plateau too high to the south and the desert too dry to the north, so Chinese settlement could spread west only along it.

UNESCO lists 15 natural World Heritage properties in China, among them the Badain Jaran Desert, inscribed in 2024 for its towers of sand and lakes, and Xinjiang Tianshan, inscribed in 2013.

Why the ground keeps moving

The Indian plate's continuing push northward beneath southern Asia raised the mountains of the south-west, and it makes much of China seismically active. Two earthquakes of the twentieth century, in eastern Gansu in 1920 and at Tangshan in Hebei in July 1976, each caused some 250,000 deaths by Britannica's count, and one in Sichuan in 2008 killed tens of thousands. The National Bureau of Statistics recorded 11 earthquakes of magnitude 5.0 or more in 2025.

Water does more damage in an ordinary year. In 2025 floods, waterlogging and geological disasters caused direct economic losses of 166.6 billion yuan, against 8.6 billion yuan from drought, and natural disasters of all kinds hit 6.07 million hectares of crops.

What the People's Republic changed on the land

China spans two of the world's ecozones, the Palearctic in the north and west and the Indomalayan in the south, and 92,300 species and subspecies of plants, animals and fungi were known there as of 2018. Horses, camels and jerboas belong to the first, leopard cats, bamboo rats and treeshrews to the second. The giant panda lives only in a limited area along the Yangtze, and UNESCO inscribed the Sichuan Giant Panda Sanctuaries in 2006.

Government surveys put forest coverage at 10% of the territory in 1949 and 25% in 2024. In 2025 alone 3.56 million hectares were afforested, and by the end of that year the country had five national parks. Arable land was estimated at 14.86% of the total area in 2005.

The air and water are measured the same way. Of 339 cities monitored in 2025, the average concentration of fine particulate matter was 28.0 micrograms per cubic metre, 4.4% lower than in 2024. Coal supplied 51.4% of the country's energy consumption in 2025 and clean sources 30.4%.

Where the borders are disputed

China's land frontier runs for about 20,000 kilometres, and several sections are contested. India administers an area north of the Brahmaputra and east of Bhutan that China claims; the boundary there is the McMahon Line of 1914, which India accepts and China rejects. The two countries also dispute Aksai Chin, further west. At sea, China, Vietnam, the Philippines, Malaysia, Taiwan and Brunei have competing claims to the Spratly Islands, China controls the Paracels, which Vietnam also claims, and China claims the Senkaku Islands, which Japan administers. This catalogue records the disputes and takes no position on any of them.