The Yellow River has been known as ‘China’s sorrow’

The Yellow River has been known as ‘China’s sorrow’

Subject : Geography

Section :Places in news

Context: Deforestation, erosion on the Loess Plateau caused the Chinese to construct levees to tame the river, in turn, worsening the risk of flooding

More on the News:

• 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.
• The study’s author’s 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.

Yellow River

• Yellow River or Huang He is the second-longest river in China, after the Yangtze River, and the sixth-longest river system in the world at the estimated length of 5,464 km.
• Originating in the Bayan Har Mountains in Qinghai province of Western China, it flows through nine provinces, and it empties into the Bohai Sea near the city of Dongying in Shandong province.
• The river has long been critical to the development of northern China, and is regarded by scholars as one cradle of civilization.
• Among the deadliest were the 1332–33 flood during the Yuan dynasty, the 1887 flood during the Qing dynasty which killed anywhere from 900,000 to 2 million people, and a Republic of China era 1931 flood (part of a massive number of floods that year) that killed 1–4 million people.
• The cause of the floods is the large amount of fine-grained loess carried by the river from the Loess Plateau, which is continuously deposited along the bottom of its channel. The sedimentation causes natural dams to slowly accumulate.
• These subaqueous dams are unpredictable and generally undetectable. Eventually, the enormous amount of water needs to find a new way to the sea, forcing it to take the path of least resistance. When this happens, it bursts out across the flat North China Plain, sometimes taking a new channel and inundating most farmland, cities or towns in its path.