CityReads | The Yellow River in 3,000 Years

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The Yellow River in 3,000 Years

The legacies of the Yellow River define the prospects of a nation.

Ruth Mostern, 2021. The Yellow River: A Natural and Unnatural History. Yale University Press.

Source:

https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300238334/yellow-river

China's Yellow River is the mother river of Chinese civilization and the "most sediment-laden river in the world". From Neolithic times to the present day, the Yellow River and its watershed have both shaped and been shaped by human society. Ruth Mostern's new book, The Yellow River: A Natural and Unnatural History, explains how environmentally transformative human activity has shaped the whole watershed and constituted the relationship between people and the river since Neolithic times.

The book demonstrates that the history of the relationship between people and the river is a history of soil as much as it is a history of water, and that some of the most important episodes in Yellow River history transpired on the semi-arid lands of the Loess Plateau, far from the riverbed itself.

Using GIS and data analysis as well as close readings of historical sources, the book reveals that although the Yellow River floodplain was sometimes a site of frequent and devastating disasters, this was only the case at times of certain decisions about public policy and infrastructure design. With an interdisciplinary approach informed by archival research and GIS (geographical information system) records, this groundbreaking volume provides unique insight into patterns, transformations, and devastating ruptures throughout ecological history and offers profound conclusions about the way we continue to affect the natural systems upon which we depend.

It is worth mentioning the data and cartography of this book are based on an innovative historical geographic information system that depicts geomorphology, waterworks, settlements, and flood locations. The geographic information system is also underpinned by a database of 3,754 spatially and temporally referenced events related to the Yellow River as recorded in historical sources: floods and droughts, construction and repair activities, policy arguments, and funding requisitions.

Seeing the Yellow River as a Whole

This book, taking a whole-basin and sediment-centered approach to the Yellow River, works to historicize the processes of sediment transport and floodplain transformation and to make their long-term consequences visible.

The Yellow River's history, the history of sediment as much as water, significantly concerns the Loess Plateau, which is the semi-arid region that lies to the west of the floodplain. When people felled trees, grazed herds of animals, and cleared land for agriculture on the Loess Plateau, they generated high rates of erosion, which washed sediment into the river. Entrained in the water, the sediment traveled downstream until it reached the wetlands and slow currents of the floodplain and settled on the riverbed. Downstream, that alluvial deposit repeatedly caused the riverbed to rise higher than the banks that surrounded it and then to change course. Upstream, after a period of substantial erosion, the topsoil disappeared, and the land became sandy and fissured with gullies.

The Yellow River is currently the most sediment-laden river in the world. As such, it is prone to create particularly mutable landscapes. The map below depicts the many occasions when the river has changed course.  When levees prevent rivers from avulsing and spreading sediment across their floodplains, the result is that water tables, riverbeds, and riverbanks rise while land begins to subside. When artificially embanked rivers overtop or breach their levees, they disgorge onto land that lies lower than the river itself, causing catastrophic floods, and when their current is powerful during floods, they deposit entrained sand, gravel, and even boulders along with fertile loam.

It is possible to precisely track the changing relationship between human activity on the floodplain and the behavior of the managed river. Timelines below reveal the gradual creation of a disaster-prone river basin, as well as the imperative to create the infrastructure that could control it.

Beginning in the late ninth century, the rising rate of erosion on the Loess Plateau initiated a millennium of frequent floods, followed soon thereafter by continuous mitigation efforts. Human activity created a disaster-prone river in another way as well.

The details of these timelines—perturbations up and down, and changes in the ratios of various activities—are the subject of the rest of this book. At the scale of decades and centuries, they help to reveal stories about climate and weather, war and colonization, taxation and demographics, and changing notions of state power and benevolent rule on both the Loess Plateau and the alluvial plain. In short, they reveal a series of biographies of the hydrosocial river.

This book is structured around a sequence of life spans. By attending to the river's entire watercourse, its whole eventful history, and its slow transformations,  the author has identified exactly when it was that the lower course turned unruly and what happened, both upstream and downstream, that led it to be that way. Each chapter describes a turning point in world-making processes along the Yellow River and a span of time when the links between the middle course and the lower course were transformed.

Few of these turning points conform to the standard dynastic dividing lines familiar to historians of China. This book primarily concerns the history of the river during the two millennia of the imperial era, but it is not a work of political history. The first chapter, the first river life span, encompassed a period of many centuries during which a relatively small population lived upstream and during which writers attested only a small number of events on the floodplain.

The next river life span resulted from the intensive period of frontier colonization on the fragile middle reaches of the river, which destroyed forests and grasslands and doubled the rate of erosion relative to earlier levels. The result was an unprecedented age of flooding, managed on the floodplain in only haphazard and sporadic ways. This is the era when the river began to be called Yellow. Historians of China have long recognized the end of the first millennium of the Common Era as a transition point in long-term history, resulting in new population distributions, new forms of economic and social organization, and new modes of governance. The beginning of the eventful era of Yellow River history is also an aspect of that transformation.

The final river life span of the imperial river is the age of the highly managed floodplain. The era began with proposals and experiments in the mid-fourteenth century and came into focus by the sixteenth century. Even as land degradation in the middle reaches of the river accelerated, with erosion there rising to unprecedented levels along with population, floodplain managers built levees ever higher and made earthworks and waterworks ever more elaborate. The system reached full buildout during the eighteenth century. By the eighteenth century, government spending to maintain the system consumed between 10 percent and 20 percent of all government spending, an amount higher than the entirety of all government spending by most European regimes at that time. Although efforts to curtail floods were successful in the medium term, the floodplain system, overwhelmed with silt, collapsed catastrophically in the mid-nineteenth century.

Historical documents and environmental science research confirm that during imperial times the river experienced thirty major course changes, approximately 1,500 floods, and, over the last millennium, almost perpetual projects of construction and repair to maintain the engineered river system.

The core arguments of this book: two kinds of human activities—those that accelerated erosion upstream and those that reduced resilience to floods on the alluvial plain—fundamentally changed the propensities of the hydrosocial Yellow River. Figure below depicts the inflection points in Yellow River history from the perspective of the Loess Plateau. On each of the three occasions when the number of settlements on the plateau significantly exceeded previous levels—the third century before the Common Era, the eleventh century of the Common Era, and the eighteenth century—the rate at which sediment accumulated on the floodplain doubled anew. Generally speaking, whenever the Loess Plateau population became denser and settlements became more numerous, erosion increased; and whenever erosion on the Loess Plateau rose, so too did catastrophe on the floodplain.

Erosion and Settlement History. There is a correlation between the density of settlement on the Loess Plateau and the rate of sediment accumulation. 

The three-thousand-year history of this book offers a unique perspective on matters of urgent significance today: enduring patterns and gradual transformations in historical ecology, sudden ruptures that upend them, and unintended environmental consequences of human action that reverberate back to the societies that engendered them.

Concluding Remarks

The Yellow River in the Anthropocene is one of the world's many endangered waterways. Its big dams and middle-course irrigation works have functioned for a few decades, but their cost has been great. A new canal project is under way, a massive south-to-north water diversion venture in western China that seeks to move water from the Yangtze River of the subtropical south into the bed of the Yellow River in the semiarid north. The Loess Plateau is recovering as a result of an aggressive campaign to plant trees and stabilize hill-sides, but it is not clear whether these monocropped grids of foliage will flourish as sustainable ecosystems.

However, even today, much of the Yellow River basin is seriously affected by water and soil erosion, and the basin remains among the worst examples of erosion worldwide. The Loess Plateau is crisscrossed with terraces and check dams, canyons and gullies, sand deserts and alkali badlands, wide alluvial plains with farms and cities, muddy streams, gigantic open-pit coal mines from which exhaust-belching trucks stream onto narrow roads, and kilometers of young shrubs and saplings growing on hill- slopes and retired farmland. At the subhumid southwestern edge of the Loess Plateau near the headwaters of the Jing River, bulldozers sculpt denuded clay hills into neatly terraced ziggurats for foresters to plant with trees. The future of the Yellow River and its denizens during an era of ecological collapse and climate catastrophe is uncertain, but its past offers lessons about both resilience and its limits.

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