Huang He

River in China; length 5,464 km/3,395 mi. Rising in Qinghai province in the west of the country, it winds eastwards to the Bohai Gulf on the Yellow Sea. The names ‘Yellow River’ and ‘Yellow Sea’ derive from the great quantities of fine yellow particles of the soil known as loess (originally wind-blown from central Asia) which the river carries. The deposition of this material helps to explain why the river is sometimes known as ‘China's sorrow’ because of disastrous floods. Flooding is now largely controlled through hydroelectric works, dykes, and embankments, but the barriers are ceasing to work because loess deposited as silt continues to raise the river bed.

History
Before 1852 the Huang He flowed into the Yellow Sea south of the Shandong Peninsula, but in that year the course shifted north and the river emptied into the Bohai Gulf. In 1938 Chinese nationalist forces breached the dykes on the south bank near Kaifeng in an attempt to halt the Japanese advance, flooding some 54,000 sq km/21,000 sq mi in Henan, Anhui, and Jiangsu, and forcing 3 million people to leave home. The Chinese rebuilt the dykes between 1946 and 1947, and diverted the river to its former course.