Chinese+Civilization+and+Technology

Technology story

During the long history of China, the Yellow River has been considered a blessing as well as a curse and has been nicknamed both "China's Pride"and "China's Sorrow" First is because The Yellow River is the longest river in China; second is because many of the flood happened of the Yellow River.The floodwaters began pouring out from Huayuankou in the early morning on Jun 9, 1938. As a result, the course of the Yellow River was diverted southwards for nine years afterward, inundating 54,000 km² of land in Henan, Anhui, and Jiangsu provinces. All in all, the flood waters took 500,000 to 900,000 lives.The flood submerged millions of homes, and since they were not informed beforehand, the majority of people did not have time to flee.



It is still debated whether it was necessary to destroy the dike in Huayuankou to cause the flood. Militarily, it is claimed that the strategy could be considered partly successful, as by 1940, the Japanese were essentially in a stalemate with the Chinese forces, because the flood had created "problems for the mobility of the Japanese Army".

The river gets its yellow color mostly from the fine-grained calcareous silts which originate in the Loess Plateau and are carried in the flow. Centuries of silt deposition and diking has caused the river to flow above the surrounding farmland, making flooding a critically dangerous problem. Flooding of the Yellow River has caused some of the highest death tolls in world history, with the 1887 Huang He flood killing 900,000 to 2,000,000 and the 1931 Huang He flood killing 1,000,000 to 3,700,000. In 1938, during the Second Sino-Japanese War, the Nationalist troops under Chiang Kai-Shek broke the levees holding back the river in order to stop the advancing Japanese troops. The river at that time flooded a huge area and took some 500,000 to 900,000 lives including a number of advancing Japanese soldiers.

the book I fond: Publisher: Association for Asian Studies Moving Wall: 3
 * Journal Information for The Journal of Asian Studies**

For 56 years, The Journal of Asian Studies has been recognized as the most authoritative and prestigious publication in the field of Asian Studies. This quarterly has been published regularly since November 1941, offering Asianists a wealth of information unavailable elsewhere. Each issue contains four to five feature articles on topics involving the history, arts, social sciences, philosophy, and contemporary issues of East, South, and Southeast Asia, as well as a large book review section.

Atlas by Rand McNally
 * Ancient World History**

http://links.jstor.org/journals/00219118.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1938_Yellow_River_flood http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huang_He

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