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| Irtysh River | |
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 The Ob-Irtysh Watershed |
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| Origin | Altay Mountains |
| Mouth | Ob River |
| Basin countries | Russia, Kazakhstan, China, Mongolia |
| Length | 4,248 km (2,640 mi) |
| Avg. discharge | 2,150 m³/s (near Tobolsk) |
| Basin area | 1,643,000 km² |
The Irtysh River (Russian: Иртыш ; Kazakh: Ertis / Ертiс ; Tatar Cyrillic: Иртеш, Latin: İrteş ; Chinese: É'ěrqísī hé / 额尔齐斯河) is a river in Siberia and is the chief tributary of the river Ob. Its name means White River. It is actually longer than the Ob to their confluence. Irtysh's main affluent is Tobol River. The Ob-Irtysh form a major basin in Asia, encompassing most of Western Siberia and the Altay Mountains.
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From its source as Kara-Irtysh (Black Irtysh) in the Mongolian Altay mountains in Xinjiang, China, Irtysh flows NW through Lake Zaysan, Kazakhstan, meeting the Ishim and Tobol rivers until it meets the Ob near Khanty-Mansiysk in western Siberia, Russia after 4,248 kilometres (2,640 mi).
Passenger, freight boats and tankers navigate most of the river between April and October, when it is not frozen. Omsk is home to the headquarters of the state-owned Irtysh River Shipping Company, and the largest river port in Western Siberia. Major hydroelectric plants at Ust-Kamenogorsk and Bakhtarminsk use the Irtysh near the Kazakhstan-Chinese border. The lock that allows river traffic to by-pass the dam at Ust-Kemenogorsk is the world's deepest, with a drop of 42 metres.1
Some of the Northern river reversal proposals, widely discussed in the 1960-70s, would see the direction of the Irtysh flow reversed, the river being used to supply water to central Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan. While these gigantic water management schemes were not implemented, a smaller Irtysh-Karaganda irrigation canal (Russian: Канал Иртыш — Караганда) was built between 1962 and 1974 to supply water to the dry Kazakh Steppes, and to one of the country's main industrial centers, Karaganda. In 2002, pipelines were constructed to supply water from the canal to the Ishim River and Kazakhstan's capital, Astana.
In the 2000s, projects for diverting a significant amounts of Irtysh water within China, such as the proposed Black Irtysh - Karamai Canal, have been decried by Kazakh and Russian environmentalists.2
The river banks were occupied by a number of Mongol and Turkic peoples for many centuries. In the 15th-16th century, the lower and middle cours of the Irtysh was within the Tatar Khanate of Sibir, conquered by the Russians in the 1580s. In the 17th century, the Zunghar Khanate, formed by the Mongol Oirat people became Russia's southern neighbor, and controlled the upper Irtysh. In the meantime, the Russian city of Omsk was founded in 1716, Semipalatinsk in 1718, Ust-Kamenogorsk in 1720 and Petropavlovsk in 1752.
The Zunghar state was destroyed by the Manchu-Chinese Qing Empire in the 1750s, and incorporated into the Qing Empire. The border between the Russian Empire and the Qing Empire (the present border between Russia and Kaakhstan in the north and Mongolia and China in the south) was settled in the early 19th century.
The main cities on the Irtysh, from source to mouth, are:
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