Yangtze River Trade

The inland and coastal commerce of the Yangtze (Chang Jiang), China’s main commercial artery, carrying rice, salt, cotton, tea, and silk by junk and sampan between the interior and the coast. After the Treaty of Tianjin (1858) opened ports along the river, foreign steamers worked the lower Yangtze to Hankou and, after gorge-navigation advances around 1900, up to Chongqing. The Yangtze patrols and treaty-port steamer lines (Jardine, Butterfield and Swire) ran this traffic into the twentieth century.