The Yellow River has been known as ‘China’s sorrow’. Now we know who was responsible

The mighty Yellow River, the ‘mother river’ of Chinese civilisation, has also been known as the ‘River of Disaster’ and ‘China’s sorrow’ because of the devastating floods it has wrought in its basin from pre-history to the last century. While much of the blame has been put on the upstream Loess Plateau, a new study has noted that the Chinese practice of building embankments is also to blame.

The study’s authors — geologists, paleontologists and environmental scientists from Jiangsu Normal University, the Chinese Academy of Science as well as the Coastal Carolina University in the United States — visited several sites along the river.

They also studied sediment and historical records to conclude that the river used to flood four times every century before humans began to alter the environment. Around 6,000 years (3500 Before Common Era), when humans brought the practice of settled farming to the region, the river began to flood 10 times.

The authors pinpointed the Chinese practice of building mud embankments — especially during the Imperial Period — to ‘tame’ the river as having only made matters worse.

‘River of Sorrow’

The Yellow River is the sixth-longest river in the world and is also the most sediment-laden.

Also known as Huang He, it originates in the province of Qinghai, flows through the Loess Plateau, where it takes sediment that gives its waters their characteristic yellow colour. It then flows across the flat North China Plain before draining into the Bohai Sea, a part of the Yellow Sea.

The sediment or loess (a type of silt) from the plateau usually settles on the river bed and raises its height, making the river especially flood-prone in the lower reaches, on the North China Plain.

The Flood of 1887, which occurred during the rule of the Qing Dynasty, is said to have killed almost two million people and is considered to be one of the deadliest natural disasters in history.

The Chinese responded to the floods in the river by constructing embankments or levees. The paper noted:

The lower Yellow River has been subject to intensive regulations during the era of imperial China. Many strategies have been proposed and practiced to tame the river, which can be summarised into two contrasting categories: “widening the channel to entrap sediments” versus “narrowing the channel by embankment to scour sediments.”

They added that their analyses suggested embankments, though the least expedient strategy for flood control, had only short-term effects on flood mitigation.

In the Yellow River’s case, deforestation and soil erosion on the Loess Plateau played an important part in increasing the need to create embankments.

“As erosion increases, vegetation becomes more difficult to recover, and more bare areas are created, which, in turn, further exacerbates erosion. The environmental effect of erosion is then propagated and amplified iteratively in the lower Yellow River by a sequence of positive feedback loops,” the paper noted.

The deposition of sediment in the river channel necessitated the construction of artificial levees to keep the river water from spilling out.

But the superelevation between the riverbed and the surrounding flood basin would be increased, making the area flood-prone. This would necessitate the need for more embankments and more floods.

“Therefore, humans’ propensity of flood control through embankment always instigates a paradox,” the authors wrote.

They added that according to their findings, the management and greening of the Loess Plateau since the 1950s, after the establishment of the People’s Republic of China, had made the flood hazard nearly zero.

The scientists suggested using structural flood control with other risk-mitigation strategies for long-term benefits. They also said attention must be paid to extreme weather events.

“Our results provide a knowledge base not only for the planning and design application of river engineering but also for developing deliverable adaptive strategies and preventive measures that may be readily transferable to other human-dominated rivers,” they wrote.

The findings of the study echo what Ruth Mostern, historian and author of The Yellow River: A Natural and Unnatural History (2021) told China Dialogue in an interview last year.

“…But rivers are not channels of water…If you think of rivers instead as being dynamic parts of complex ecosystems that basically are about forces of gravity moving things from higher to lower elevation, not only water but also everything that is entrained in the water, rivers will always flood. That’s what rivers do,” she had said.

Human disturbances dominated the unprecedentedly high frequency of Yellow River flood over the last millennium, was published February 22, 2023 in the journal Science Advances.

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