So why did the industrial revolution begin in Britain and not along the Yangzi river?

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It began overseas relief work in 1991, responding to flooding along China's Yangzi river.

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It is now second on the river only to the sprawling Yangzi River company.

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Much later, she turned up under a different name in Zhangjiagang, a port on China's Yangzi River.

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The Yangzi River flood has soaked up all the clamor of life in the towns around the lake.

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The deluge along the Yangzi River, if not the biggest ever, is certainly the largest in recent memory.

CNN: FIGHTING FLOODS

China issued a second water-pollution alert within a month, when phenol, a dangerous chemical, leaked into the Yangzi river near Shanghai.

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Provincial authorities in Sichuan, on the upper reaches of the Yangzi, have already banned logging in primal forests under their jurisdiction.

CNN: FIGHTING FLOODS

But as their size has shrunk, so has the capacity of the Yangzi valley to accommodate spillage caused by the annual monsoon rains.

CNN: FIGHTING FLOODS

Minsheng's former reputation for good management was still alive in Chongqing, and it stood in stark contrast to that of the Yangzi River Steamboat Company.

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Soil erosion along the Yangzi has been a key culprit.

CNN: FIGHTING FLOODS

The city of Shanghai has been utterly transformed, and development at an astonishing pace has spread far down the length of the Yangzi river, a region encompassing perhaps 300m people.

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Later this year the Yangzi will be blocked and diverted at the site of the Three Gorges dam, a giant project that will turn the 600 kilometres below Chongqing into a lake.

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It takes about as long to get a container from Long Beach, California, to Shanghai as it does to get one from Shanghai to Chongqing, a thousand miles or so up the Yangzi river.

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Unlike most of his peers, who lived a comfortable colonial existence in Shanghai's international settlement, Crow reported on floods up the Yangzi, negotiated the release of hostages from a Shandong warlord and slept in inns so grim he would stand his bed legs in kerosene to keep centipedes at bay.

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