East and South Asia

East Asia covers the eastern part of China, the Korean Peninsula and the Japanese islands, stretching several thousand kilometres north to south along the sea coast. Its foundation is the Sino-Korean and South China platforms made of the most ancient crystalline rocks. The platform is covered by alluvium brought by the Yellow River and Yangtze; this is the Great Plain of China. The plain’s north has a temperate monsoon climate and the south a subtropical monsoon climate: winter is dry and cold in the north (about –6 °C) and warm in the south (+3 °C); summer is hot, with +26 °C in July on the coast. Annual rainfall is 500 mm in the north and 1 000 mm in the south, with about 80 % in summer. The Yellow River and Yangtze cross the plain, and there are many lakes and reservoirs (Lake Tai is among the largest). On fertile brown soils farmers get two harvests a year in the north and even three in the south. The south is taken up by the low South China Mountains (Nanling, Wuyi) up to 2 000 m. Main crops are rice, Chinese tea, wheat, soya, gaoliang (a kind of sorghum) and cotton; in the south sugar cane, oranges, mandarins, pineapples and bananas. The South China Mountains are rich in tin and tungsten and East China in coal and iron ore. Few natural forests remain because the plain has been densely developed since ancient times.