Huang He - "Yellow River" (14 photos)

The opening of the reservoir on the famous Yellow River - impressive sight. After the opening of the locks from the reservoir rush huge streams of water and sand. This discharge of water makes it possible to clean the flow of the river from the silt and prevent localized floods.





By the way, the Yellow River (which means "Yellow River") is the second largest river in China.



Water flows at an incredible speed: 2,600 cubic meters per second.





Translated from Chinese, its name is “Yellow River”, which due to the abundance of sediment, giving a yellowish tint to its waters. It is thanks to them that the sea into which the river flows is called Yellow.



The Yellow River. View from space:



Huang He originates in the eastern part of the Tibetan Plateau at an altitude of over 4,000 meters.



In order to protect against floods, the Yellow River and its tributaries are fenced off. large-scale system of dams, the total length of which is about 5 thousand km. Dam failures lead to massive flooding and displacement channels. This led to the death of a large number of people and gave the river the nickname "Woe of China".



The Yellow River Basin provides about 140 million people with drinking and irrigation water.



From 602 AD e. To this day, 26 changes in the course of the Yellow River and 1,573 dam breaks have been recorded.

Huang He - "Yellow River"



In 1938, there was a flood on the Yellow River arranged by nationalist government in central China during the first half of the Second Sino-Japanese War in an attempt to stop the rapid advance of Japanese troops. It was later called "the largest an act of ecological warfare in history."



Flooding covered and destroyed thousands of square kilometers agricultural land and moved the mouth of the Yellow River hundreds of miles to south. Thousands of villages were flooded or destroyed, and several millions of people were forced to leave their homes, becoming refugees. Official assessment of the dead by the post-war commission of nationalists claims that 800,000 people drowned in the flood, but these data may be underestimated



In 11 AD e. The Yellow River made a breakthrough into a new direction, which caused a humanitarian catastrophe, one of the factors that led to fall of the Xin Dynasty.



Hukou Waterfall on the border of Shaanxi and Shanxi:



The maximum recorded movement of the Yellow River channel was about 800 km.



Today, the Yellow River valley is densely populated. Among the cities located along its banks, the largest are Lanzhou, Yinchuan, Baotou, Luoyang, Zhengzhou, Kaifeng, Jinan. (Photo by Chris Bryant):