Tourists watch floodwaters gushing out of the Xiaolangdi dam during a sand-washing operation of the Yellow river in Jiyuan, China, 2010. Photograph: Miao qiunao/AP/Press Association
In 2007, the Yellow river dried up: for 277 days it failed to reach the sea, its lower reaches reduced to a broad highway of cracked mud. The Yellow river begins its 3,000-mile journey on the high Qinghai Tibet plateau and meanders across north China until it reaches the Bohai Gulf. It is celebrated as China’s mother river because of the state-sponsored claim that Chinese civilisation began in the fertile soils of its middle reaches. That it should have dried up for most of a year, therefore, carried a significance far beyond the immediate environmental catastrophe. Continue reading
