The Yellow River falls into the East China Sea, and Wan Li rushes into the heart. These two poems by Li Bai, a poet in the Tang Dynasty, express our people's deep feelings for the Yellow River. In fact, the Yellow River flows from Bayan Kara on the "roof of the world" to Bohai Bay on the west coast of the Pacific Ocean. Sometimes it is wild and unrestrained, and it is flooded with disasters. It is called "dragon" and "river of disaster". However, the flood of the Yellow River has caused a thousand miles of wilderness, and there is a loving mother's heart in her violent character. The people of China have lived, multiplied, worked and struggled in this vast land for generations, creating a glorious history and splendid culture, so people also call the Yellow River the cradle of the Chinese nation.
Before the Han Dynasty, there was no such name as "Yellow River". At that time, people called the Yellow River "River" and used the word "Chuan" to refer to ordinary rivers. Therefore, ancient books only say that "the river flows out of Kunlun". The name of the Yellow River first appeared in Han Shu and was written by Ban Gu, a historian of the Eastern Han Dynasty. But it was not until the Song Dynasty that people generally called it "Yellow River" or "Yellow" for short. This is probably because the Yellow River contains a lot of sediment, and the river is yellow, which is different from other rivers. It can be seen that the Yellow River has a large sediment concentration, which was recognized as early as the Han Dynasty.
Why is the sediment concentration of the Yellow River particularly high? This should start with its origin.
The Yellow River originates in Bayan Kara, Qinghai Province, flows through Qinghai, Sichuan, Gansu, Ningxia, Inner Mongolia, Shaanxi, Shanxi, Henan and other provinces, and joins the Bohai Sea between Kenli and Lijin counties in Shandong Province, with a total length of 5,464 kilometers and a drainage area of more than 750,000 square kilometers. It is the second longest river in China.
When the Yellow River crosses the Qinghai Plateau at an altitude of 4 kilometers. It is a small stream with slow and clear water flowing from Qinghai Plateau. After the confluence of Datong River, Jinshui River and Tiao River, the water volume has greatly increased. After passing through Hetao Plain, it reaches below Hekou Town, Inner Mongolia, and the Yellow River enters the middle reaches. This section of the Yellow River flows through the loess plateau valley between Shanxi and Shaanxi provinces, with a sharp increase in water volume and a torrent rolling, scouring the loess along the way. Coupled with the large amount of sediment brought in by small and large tributaries, the river becomes turbid and becomes a world-famous "mud river". When water conservancy workers measured in Shaanxi County, Henan Province, the average sediment concentration per cubic meter of river water reached 37.6 kg, and the highest sediment concentration in flood period was 650 kg per cubic meter. The total amount of sediment from the middle and upper reaches to the lower reaches of the Yellow River averages 65.438+0.6 billion tons per year, and the sediment concentration is really amazing.
The Yellow River enters the lower reaches from below Jin Meng and flows through the North China Plain. Due to the low-lying downstream, slow flow rate and large amount of sediment deposition, the riverbed is silted year by year. Some river sections are three or four meters higher than the farmland on both sides of the river, and some places are even more than ten meters higher, forming an "overground river". In this way, in the flood season, the river is easy to burst, divert and flood. Under the rule of the reactionary classes in past dynasties, the Yellow River was not governed, and there were 1500 breaches and 26 major diversions in more than two thousand years. Every breach has caused great losses to people's lives and property. War of Resistance against Japanese Aggression period 1938 Kuomintang reactionaries adopted a policy of non-resistance. In order to flee for their lives, they frantically blew up the south embankment of the Yellow River at the Huayuankou in Zhengzhou, diverting the Yellow River south, causing 44 counties in eastern Henan, northern Anhui and northern Jiangsu to be flooded, killing 890,000 people and turning it into a desolate "Yellow River flooded area" thousands of miles away. Only after liberation, when the Yellow River returned to the people's hands, did it really get a new life and began to change its fierce and violent character for the benefit of the people.