40 Fun Facts About Yellow River

The Yellow River is called both China's Pride and China's what, after floods that killed millions?

Sorrow is the word history attached to the river: by one count it flooded 1,593 times in about 2,540 years.

The Chinese idiom about the Yellow River flowing clear means the same as which English expression?

When pigs fly is the nearest English match, because the silt-laden river running clear was thought impossible. A clear stretch was once reported to a Ming emperor as a good omen.

In Chinese legend, which fish becomes a dragon by leaping the Dragon Gate falls on the Yellow River?

Carp that clear the falls become dragons in the tale, which made the leap a Chinese symbol for passing the imperial exams.

Chiang Kai-shek's troops broke the Yellow River's dikes in 1938 to slow which invading army?

Japanese troops were slowed, but the man-made flood killed hundreds of thousands of Chinese civilians through drowning, famine and plague.

What do aircraft drop on the frozen Yellow River to break up ice dams before they cause floods?

Explosives dropped from the air shatter ice jams in Inner Mongolia, where collapsing ice dams caused 11 major floods in a century.

Which amphibian native to the Yellow River is now farmed in large numbers across China?

Giant salamander stock on Chinese farms is mostly of Yellow River origin, and released animals have spread that type into other rivers.

In traditional Chinese belief, the Yellow River flowed down from heaven as a continuation of what?

The Milky Way was pictured as the river's upper course, and one legend sends the envoy Zhang Qian upstream until he meets the Weaving Girl star, Vega.

By one estimate, Yellow River water carries 34 times as much silt as which famous African river?

The Nile carries about 1 kilogram of silt in each cubic meter of water, against 34 for the Yellow River and 10 for the Colorado.

As the cradle of their civilization, the Yellow River is given which family title by the Chinese?

Mother River is the affectionate name, and its basin still holds about 13 percent of China's cultivated land.

Which ancient man-made waterway from Beijing to Hangzhou meets the Yellow River along its route?

The Grand Canal is the longest artificial waterway in the world, and Yellow River floods repeatedly threatened to put it out of action.

Which Chinese province has a name meaning 'south of the river', a reference to the Yellow River?

Henan means south of the river and neighboring Hebei means north of it, yet the border between the two now follows a different river, the Zhang.

Which legendary ruler supposedly tamed the Yellow River's floods by dredging rather than damming?

Yu the Great is said to have spent 13 years on the work, passing his own front door three times without once going inside.

Which easily eroded sediment, washed off a vast inland plateau, gives the Yellow River its color?

Loess has long poured into the river at around 1.6 billion tons a year, making it the most sediment-laden river in the world.

Which river, reaching the sea at Shanghai, is the only one in China longer than the Yellow River?

The Yangtze is longer by several hundred kilometers and carries many times more water than the Yellow River.

What is the Mandarin name of the Yellow River, whose first word is the Chinese for yellow?

Huang He is the Mandarin name, but while the water still ran fairly clear, ancient texts simply called it He, the River.

The Yellow River rises over 4,000 meters up on which highland, whose uplift first created the river?

Tibetan Plateau springs feed two clear lakes, Gyaring and Ngoring, long before the young river picks up any of its famous silt.

Which body of water, with the port of Tianjin on its western shore, receives the Yellow River?

The Bohai Sea is where the river ends today, though from 1128 to 1855 it swung south and met the coast hundreds of kilometers away.

Under which dynasty, China's last, did the 1887 Yellow River flood kill at least 900,000 people?

Qing rule was in its final decades when the flood struck, one of the deadliest natural disasters in recorded history.

Yellow River floods and drought in 1898 helped fuel which anti-foreign uprising in northern China?

The Boxer Rebellion grew among villagers left destitute by the floods, many of whom blamed foreign and Christian influence for the disasters.

Which use of Yellow River water, up fivefold since 1950, was blamed when the river ran dry in the 1990s?

Irrigation took so much that in 1997 the river failed to reach the sea for 226 days in a row.

Which hardy grain did early farmers along the Yellow River start growing about 8,000 years ago?

Millet, not rice, was the staple here: the oldest evidence of foxtail millet farming lies along the river's ancient course at Cishan.

Traditional Yellow River rafts in Gansu and Ningxia float on the inflated skins of which animal?

Sheep skins, taken off whole and blown full of air, are tied under a wooden frame: a small raft uses 13 of them and a big one as many as 600.

The Yellow River runs south to form the border between which two similarly named Chinese provinces?

Shanxi and Shaanxi differ only by tone in Mandarin, which is why one of them is spelled with a doubled letter in English.

Which capital of Gansu province saw the first permanent road bridge over the Yellow River open in 1909?

Lanzhou got its bridge from a German firm, whose steel parts and machinery were shipped in through the port of Tianjin.

In which coastal province, the birthplace of Confucius, does the Yellow River reach the sea?

Shandong holds the river's mouth today, but silt and floods have shifted that mouth by as much as 480 kilometers over the centuries.

Around its source the Yellow River is called Ma Chu, meaning the river of which bird?

Peacock is the meaning of the local name, used on the high grasslands where the stream still runs clear between two lakes.

Xian Xinghai's 1939 Yellow River piece, later turned into a piano concerto, was written as what?

The Yellow River Cantata was first sung at Yan'an by a forty-strong choir with a makeshift orchestra, and it soon spread to all parts of China.

Which dynasty, by tradition China's first, supposedly arose on the Yellow River around 2100 BC?

The Xia were founded, the ancient historian Sima Qian wrote, after tribes along the river united to fight its floods.

Which largest tributary of the Yellow River flows past the ancient capital Xi'an?

The Wei joins at Tongguan, the spot where the Yellow River makes its last sharp turn east toward the sea.

Which city was destroyed in 1642 when Yellow River dikes were deliberately cut during a rebel siege?

Kaifeng lost an estimated 300,000 of its 378,000 people to the flood and to the famine and plague that followed.

Which vast lowland, home to Beijing, was built up over millennia by silt from the Yellow River?

The North China Plain is in effect one great delta of silt, across which the river has changed course 26 times in recorded history.

Sanjiangyuan reserve protects the headwaters of the Yellow River and which river of Southeast Asia?

The Mekong rises in the same highland reserve, whose Chinese name means the source of three rivers.

Which Yellow River waterfall, China's second largest, is named after the mouth of a flask?

Hukou squeezes the river into a gap only 20 to 30 meters wide, so the water shoots out like tea poured from a pot.

What name is shared by the Yellow River's great northern loop and the desert plateau inside it?

Ordos names both: the loop runs about 1,500 kilometers and wraps around the Mu Us and Kubuqi deserts.

From 1128 to 1855 the Yellow River ran south and took over the lower course of which other river?

The Huai was left so choked with silt that it never regained its old mouth, and its water now pools in Hongze Lake.

Which figure of Chinese myth drank the Yellow River dry while chasing the sun across the sky?

Kua Fu still died of thirst in the tale, and the club he dropped is said to have grown into a forest of peach trees.

Which Chinese deity, whose name means Lord of the River, is the god of the Yellow River?

Hebo was honored with sacrifices cast into the water, which in ancient accounts included young women sent out as brides on a raft.

Which first major dam on the Yellow River, finished in 1960, quickly clogged with silt?

Sanmenxia trapped 1.8 billion metric tons of sediment in its first 18 months and soon had to be re-engineered.

Which philosophy is linked by one geographer to keeping Yellow River levees low and far apart?

Taoism favored giving the river room, while the rival Confucian school wanted high levees close in, to free more land for farming.

In Mongolian the Yellow River is also called Khatan gol, the river of which royal figure?

Queen River is one Mongolian name for it; the other, Shar moron, simply means yellow river, like the Chinese name.