1. A Calamity that Claimed Millions
Between snow and ice melt, heavy rains, and a seemingly ceaseless sequence of cyclones, the Yangtze and Huai rivers experienced catastrophic flooding. Downstream, the waters rose nearly 6 feet above the Shanghai Bund – the waterfront area in the city’s center. Upstream, in the region of Wuhan, the water level rose an incredible 53 feet above the yearly average. Significant but relatively less disastrous flooding also occurred in the Yellow River basin and along the Grand Canal. Farmlands and housing along the rivers were devastated. 15% of the rice and wheat crops were destroyed, in a country that had little margin to spare. 53 million people were impacted. The toll in lives was horrific. About 150,000 people were directly drowned, while millions more perished from starvation and in the subsequent diseases and epidemics. All in all, up to 4 million people perished, making the 1931 China Floods history’s deadliest natural disaster.
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Where Did We Find This Stuff? Some Sources and Further Reading
Adams, Mark – Meet Me in Atlantis: My Obsessive Quest to Find the Sunken City (2015)
Callendar, Gae – The Minoans and the Mycenaeans: Aegean Society in the Bronze Age (1999)
Dialogue Earth – Picturing Disaster: The 1931 Wuhan Flood
Down to Earth – The Yellow River Has Been Known as ‘China’s Sorrow’
Encyclopedia Britannica – Shaanxi Province Earthquake of 1556
Facts and Details – Yellow River
Federer, Kenneth L. – Encyclopedia of Dubious Archaeology: From Atlantis to the Walum Olum (2010)
Flood List – Central China Flood, 1931
History Collection – The Worst Avoidable Disasters in World History
Live Science – ‘Lost City’ of Atlantis: Facts & Fable
National Geographic – Atlantis
Page, Sir Denys Lionel – The Santorini Volcano and the Destruction of Minoan Crete (1970)
