The Yangtze
From the Tibetan Plateau to the East China Sea
▶ Play it onlineThe Yangtze starts on the Tibetan Plateau as the Jinsha, drops off the edge of it, and crosses the whole width of China to reach the sea at Shanghai. That fall is the thing to feel on this plate: high ground in the west, a long descent through the Sichuan basin and the gorges, then the flat, low country in the east. The Jialing, the Wu, the Han and the Gan come in from either side as their own pieces, and the main stem is carved into the surface as a channel.
What a child works out
- A river can start on a plateau five kilometres up and still reach the sea.
- The steepest part of the journey is short; most of the river is slow and low.
- Some of the world's biggest cities sit on this one river system.
A download, to print yourself
- A .3mf file with the colours already assigned
- One STL per piece, for any other slicer
- A print guide with the settings and the order to print in
- For your own use; the licence is in the download
What you need to print it
- A build plate that takes 250 × 176 mm: the Bambu Lab A1, P1S and X1C (256 mm) do, the A1 mini (180 mm) does not
- A multicolour setup such as an AMS, for the colours as designed
Printed it? Got an idea?
Send me photos of your print and I'll add them to this page — or tell me what you'd add, leave out or change on The Yangtze.
The plate
- Pieces
- 16 pieces
- Plate
- 250 × 176 mm
- Scale
- 1 mm ≈ 11.2 km
- Vertical exaggeration
- × 6.21
- Thickness
- 8.8 mm
- Smallest piece
- 115 mm²
- Fit
- 0.35 mm clearance
- Material
- PLA, printed in Switzerland
8 named; the rest are sub-basins the source data leaves unnamed.
B5 — the size of a school exercise book.
How much ground one millimetre of plate covers.
Height is stretched by this factor so the relief is readable at desk size.
Nothing is cut smaller than a child can pick up.
Printed in place, so every piece seats first time without sanding.
Every named piece
- Chang Jiang
- Chang Jiang 2
- Gan
- Han
- Jialing
- Jinsha
- Jinsha 2
- Wu
More from Watersheds
See all →
North America by River
A continent divided only by where water goes
No countries, no states. Twenty-nine pieces, each one the whole territory that drains into a single river.
- Pieces
- 29 pieces
- Scale
- 1 mm ≈ 49.4 km
- Suitable for
- Ages 8 and up
- Price
- CHF 15.00
The Mississippi
The basin that drains a third of a continent
Fifteen pieces — Missouri, Ohio, Arkansas, Red, Illinois — that together are about three million square kilometres of drainage.
- Pieces
- 13 pieces
- Scale
- 1 mm ≈ 14.5 km
- Suitable for
- Ages 8 and up
- Price
- CHF 15.00
The Upper Mississippi
The river before the Missouri joins it
Twenty-one pieces — the Minnesota, the St Croix, the Wisconsin, the Des Moines, the Cedar — draining the northern half of the Mississippi.
- Pieces
- 16 pieces
- Scale
- 1 mm ≈ 4.7 km
- Suitable for
- Ages 8 and up
- Price
- CHF 15.00