Sichuan Basin
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Sichuan Basin
Sichuan Basin, Chinese (Pinyin) Sichuan Pendi or (Wade-Giles romanization) Ssu-ch’uan P’en-ti, conventional Szechwan Basin, basin comprising the greater part of eastern Sichuan province and the western portion of Chongqing municipality, southwestern China. It is surrounded by the highlands of the Plateau of Tibet on the west and the Yunnan-Guizhou Plateau on the south and the Wu Mountains on the east and the Daba Mountains on the north, all of which protect the interior from temperature extremes. The basin covers 88,600 square miles (229,500 square km) of red-brick sandstone, deeply dissected in the south by the Yangtze River (Chang Jiang) and in the centre by three of its tributaries. Its floor is just under 800 feet (240 metres) in elevation, and its outer margins lie at about 2,000 feet (600 metres). The basin, which is densely populated, has a mild climate that permits diversified agriculture, mainly on terraced hillsides. The basin is one of China’s main rice-producing areas; other products include tung oil, sugarcane, oranges, tangerines, and medicinal herbs. Industries utilize the coal, petroleum, natural gas, salt, manganese, sulfur, and iron ore deposits of the basin. Chengdu is the major centre of population, and Chongqing lies on its eastern edge.
Eastern Asia: Southern China
The Sichuan Basin is a fertile, subtropical expanse of low hills and plains completely encircled by mountains. Tibetan borderlands lie to the west and to the north, the Yunnan Plateau extends to the south, and to the east lie several hundred miles of middle-elevation hills cut by the eastward flowing Changjiang (Yangtze) River. The basin once supported extensive subtropical evergreen broadleaf forests, but 5,000 years of agriculture have taken a toll on the natural environment. Today, a few remnant patches of original forest persist on inaccessible slopes of hills in and around the basin, but agricultural and urban landscapes prevail.
Geography of Sichuan Province, China
Sichuan is the second largest of China's 23 provinces based on its land area of 187,260 square miles (485,000 sq km). It is located in southwestern China adjacent to the country's largest province, Qinghai. Sichuan's capital city is Chengdu and as of 2007, the province had a population of 87,250,000 people. Sichuan is an important province to China because of its abundant agricultural resources which include such Chinese staples as rice and wheat. Sichuan is also rich in mineral resources and is one of China's main industrial centers. The following is a list of ten things to know about Sichuan Province: 1) Human settlement of Sichuan Province is believed to date back to the 15th century B.C.E. In the 9th century B.C.E., Shu (what is present-day Chengdu) and Ba (today's Chongqing City) grew to become the largest kingdoms in the region. 2) Shu and Ba were subsequently destroyed by the Qin Dynasty and by the 3rd century B.C.E., the area was developed with sophisticated irrigation systems and dams which ended seasonal flooding of the region.
Knowledge Graph
Examples
1 Haze hovered over China’s Sichuan Basin in early May 2011. The Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Terra satellite captured this natural-color image on May 6, 2011.
2 The Sichuan Basin (Chinese: 四川盆地; pinyin: Sìchuān Péndì), or Szechwan Basin, is a lowland region in southwestern China.
3 Along the Sichuan Basin’s southwestern margin, haze creeps into valleys, coloring them dingy gray.