The Yellow River Is the Second Longest River in China and the Cradle of Chinese Civilization

YELLOWRIVER

The Yellow River is the second longest river in China and the cradle of Chinese civilization as the Nile is cradle of Egyptian civilization. It originates in Tibet—like the Yangtze, China's largest river, and the MekongRiver—and gets nearly 45 percent of its water from glaciers and vast underground springs of the Qinghai-Tibet plateau. From Tibet it flows for 5,464 kilometers (about 3,400 miles) through Qinghai, Gansu, Ningxia, Inner Mongolia, the border of Shaanxi and Shanxi, Henan and Shandong before it empties into Bo HaiGulf in the Yellow Sea.

The Yellow River is known as the Huang in China. It is slow and sluggish along most of its course and some regard it as the world's muddiest major river, discharging three times the sediment of the Mississippi River. It gets its name and color from the yellow silt it picks up in the Shaanxi Loess Plateau . The Yellow River flows in braided streams, a network of smaller channles that weave in and out of each other. In each channel slt slowly builds the riverbed above the surrounding landscape and gives the river its devastating habit of breaking its banks and changing course,

The Yellow River is a vital to making northern China inhabitable. It supplies water to 155 million people, or 12 percent of the Chinese population, and irrigates 18 million acres—15 percent of China’s farmland. More than 400 million people live in the YellowRiver basin. Agricultural societies appeared on its banks more than 7,000 years ago. Web Sites: WikipediaWikipedia University of MassachusettsU Mass Yellow River Conservancy Commission Yellow River Conservancy Commission Maps : China Highlights China Highlights

Yellow River Floods: Sometimes called the "River of Sorrow," the Yellow River is one of the world's most dangerous and destructive rivers. Since historians began keeping records in 602 B.C., the river has changed course 26 times and produced 1,500 floods that have killed millions of people. The root of these disasters is the large amount of silt generated by soil erosion.

From time to time the Yellow River overflows its banks and fills huge plains with large amounts of water. Floods sometimes occur when blocks of ice block the Yellow River. About once a century these floods reach catastrophic levels.

When the levees of the Yellow River break, which happens with some regularity, the countryside is devastated. When the river’s dikes were breached in 132 B.C., floods occurred in 16 districts and a new channel was opened in the middle of the plain. Ten of millions of peasants were affected. The break remained for 23 years until Emperor Wu-ti visited the scene and supervised its repair.

In A.D. 11, the Yellow River breached its dikes near the same place, and the river changed course and forged an new path to sea, a hundred miles away from its former mouth. Repair work took several decades.

In a tactic intended to halt the southward movement of Japanese soldiers from Manchuria before World War II, Chiang Kai-shek ordered his soldiers to breach the levees of the Yellow River and purposely divert its flow. At least 200,000, maybe millions, died, millions more were made homeless and the Japanese advanced anyway.

Sometimes when the Yellow River floods it becomes like a flowing mudslide. The river normally carries an enormous amount of silt and the amount increases when it floods. During a 1958 flood sediment levels were measured at 35 pounds per square foot, causing the river surface to become ‘wrinkled.