Landscape

The Yellow River黄河

Called China's Sorrow, and the cradle at the same time. It carries an extraordinary sediment load from the loess plateau — the water genuinely is opaque yellow — which raises its own bed, so for centuries it ran above the surrounding farmland behind dykes and broke them catastrophically. It has changed course across hundreds of kilometres more than twenty times in recorded history. Chinese civilisation began on its middle reaches, and the relationship between the state and this river, which required organised mass labour to control, is one of the standard explanations for why Chinese government took the shape it did.