Saturday, August 22, 2026 Search My Trip EnglishChinese
World news · travel · culture
Taiwan The Taiwan Times
Taiwan's window to the world

Pamir River

The 883rd longest river in the world

km

The Pamir River is a shared river located in the Badakhshan Province of Afghanistan and in the Gorno-Badakhshan in Tajikistan. It is a tributary of the Panj River, and forms the northern boundary of Afghanistan's Wakhan District. The river has its sources in the Pamir Mountains in the far eastern part of Gorno-Badakhshan, Tajikistan. It flows between the Alichur mountain range in the north and the Wakhan District in the south. It starts from the Lake Zorkul, at a height of 4,130 meters, and then flows west, and later southwest. Near the town of Langar, at 2,799 m, its confluences with the Wakhan River forms the Panj River. The Pamir forms the boundary between Afghanistan and Tajikistan along its entire length. Northwest of Langar is the 6,726 m (22, 067 ft) high Karl Marx Peak and Friedrich Engels Peak (6,507 m (21, 348 ft)). A road runs along the river on the Tajik side to Khargush where it turns north to join the Pamir Highway. A road of lower quality continues east past Zorkul, almost to the Chinese border. Scottish explorer John Wood was the first known European to try to find the source of the Oxus, or Pamir River. He made a pioneering journey in 1839 and reached Lake Zorkul.

Flows through: Afghanistan.

River data from Wikidata (CC0); lengths normalised to a common unit.

Other major rivers

  1. Amazon6,992 km
  2. Nile6,650 km
  3. Yangtze River6,300 km
  4. Bian River5,806 km
  5. Yellow River5,464 km
  6. Paraná River4,880 km
  7. River Congo4,700 km
  8. Mekong River4,350 km