The Tibetan name is “River of the Peacock”, in Mongolian it is sometimes called the “Queen River”, and ancient Chinese records have referred to it as the “Murky River”, but for the rest of us, it can only be the Yellow River – 黃河 in Chinese. Regarded by scholars as a birthplace of ancient Chinese civilisation, the river and its tributaries flow past some of the country’s oldest cities, including Lanzhou, Baotou, Xi’an, Taiyuan, Luoyang, Zhengzhou, Kaifeng, and Jinan. It has also flooded more than 1,500 times in the last 4,000 years, changing course ona dozen occasions. Today, the nearly 5,500-kilometre-long waterway irrigates as much as 15 percent of China’s arable land, feeds around 12 percent of the population, and supplies water to more than 60 cities.
Why yellow? This…
