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Historic Disasters That Were Way Worse Than People Think

Khalid Elhassan April 6, 2020 33 min

Yellow River - 1887 Yellow River flood — 1887 Yellow River Flood. Hakai Magazine

39. The River of Sorrows

The Yellow River at Hokou Falls. Wikimedia

The Yellow River in northern China has been the cradle of that country’s civilization. On numerous occasions, however, it has also been China’s curse: another name for the Yellow River is “The River of Sorrows“. The river, which got its name from the yellow loess silt it carries and that gives it a distinctive color, is lined with dikes to keep it from overflowing its banks. Those dikes have failed on numerous occasions, with disastrous consequences.

A boat on the lower and more placid reaches of the Yellow River. Pexels

From time to time throughout China’s history, sudden heavy rainfalls have caused the Yellow River’s water level to rapidly rise. Sometimes that leads to the river topping and overflowing the protective dikes, or breaching them outright. In 1887, as seen below, one such episode led to the Yellow River’s worst flooding, and history’s second most tragic natural disaster.

Written by

Khalid Elhassan

A lifelong history buff, I developed a particular passion for WW2 history as a child, when I spent hours listening to my grandfather, enraptured, as he recounted his wartime experiences in the British East African Campaign and with the British 8th Army in North Africa.

I graduated with a history BA from George Mason University, then went on to get a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. After lawyering for a decade, I moved to sunny Rio de Janeiro and a less demanding career, opening a tourism agency in Copacabana.

A big chunk of my free time is spent blogging (you can follow me on Quora https://www.quora.com/profile/Khalid-Elhassan ) or freelance writing, mostly about my favorite subject, history.