<P> The 1615 Latin account of the Jesuit missions to China included descriptions of the "Iansu" and "Iansuchian". The posthumous account's translation of the name as "Son of the Ocean" shows that Ricci, who by the end of his life was fluent in literary Chinese, was introduced to it as the homophonic 洋子 江 rather than the' proper' 揚子江 . Further, although railroads and the Shanghai concessions subsequently turned it into a backwater, Yangzhou was the lower river's principal port for much of the Qing Dynasty, directing Liangjiang's important salt monopoly and connecting the Yangtze with the Grand Canal to Beijing . (That connection also made it one of the Yellow River's principal ports between the floods of 1344 and the 1850s, during which time the Yellow River ran well south of Shandong and discharged into the ocean only a few hundred kilometres away from the mouth of the Yangtze .) By 1800, English cartographers such as Aaron Arrowsmith had adopted the French style of the name as Yang - tse or Yang - tse Kiang . The British diplomat Thomas Wade emended this to Yang - tzu Chiang as part of his formerly popular romanization of Chinese, based on the Beijing dialect instead of Nanjing's and first published in 1867 . The spellings Yangtze and Yangtze Kiang was a compromise between the two methods adopted at the 1906 Imperial Postal Conference in Shanghai, which established postal romanization . Hanyu Pinyin was adopted by the PRC's First Congress in 1958, but it was not widely employed in English outside mainland China prior to the normalization of diplomatic relations between the United States and the PRC in 1979; since that time, the spelling Yangzi has also been used . </P> <P> The source and upper reaches of the Yangtze are located in ethnic Tibetan areas of Qinghai . In Tibetan, the Tuotuo headwaters are the Machu (རྨ ་ ཆུ ་, w rMa - chu, literally "Red River" or (perhaps "Wound - (like Red) River?")). The Tongtian is the Drichu (འབྲི ་ ཆུ ་, w' Bri Chu, literally "River of the Female Yak"; transliterated into Chinese as 直 曲, p Zhíqū). </P> <P> The river originates from several tributaries in the eastern part of the Tibetan Plateau, two of which are commonly referred to as the "source". Traditionally, the Chinese government has recognized the source as the Tuotuo tributary at the base of a glacier lying on the west of Geladandong Mountain in the Tanggula Mountains . This source is found at 33 ° 25 ′ 44" N 91 ° 10 ′ 57" E ﻿ / ﻿ 33.42889 ° N 91.18250 ° E ﻿ / 33.42889; 91.18250 and while not the furthest source of the Yangtze, it is the highest source at 5,342 m (17,526 ft) above sea level . The true source of the Yangtze, hydrologically the longest river distance from the sea, is at Jari Hill at the head of the Dam Qu tributary, approximately 325 km (202 mi) southeast of Geladandong . This source was only discovered in the late 20th century and lies in wetlands at 32 ° 36 ′ 14" N 94 ° 30 ′ 44" E ﻿ / ﻿ 32.60389 ° N 94.51222 ° E ﻿ / 32.60389; 94.51222 and 5,170 m (16,960 ft) above sea level just southeast of Chadan Township in Zadoi County, Yushu Prefecture, Qinghai . As the historical spiritual source of the Yangtze, the Geladandong source is still commonly referred to as the source of the Yangtze since the discovery of the Jari Hill source . </P> <P> These tributaries join and the river then runs eastward through Qinghai (Tsinghai), turning southward down a deep valley at the border of Sichuan (Szechwan) and Tibet to reach Yunnan . In the course of this valley, the river's elevation drops from above 5,000 m (16,000 ft) to less than 1,000 m (3,300 ft). The headwaters of the Yangtze are situated at an elevation of about 4,900 m (16,100 ft). In its descent to sea level, the river falls to an altitude of 305 m (1,001 ft) at Yibin, Sichuan, the head of navigation for riverboats, and to 192 m (630 ft) at Chongqing (Chungking). Between Chongqing and Yichang (I - ch'ang), at an altitude of 40 m (130 ft) and a distance of about 320 km (200 mi), it passes through the spectacular Yangtze Gorges, which are noted for their natural beauty but are dangerous to shipping . </P>

What is the source of two china's great rivers