Near Quli Village, Shaanxi: 37° 17' 26" N, 110° 40' 52" E
After 1,800 miles of reeling through China, we at last approach, inside a suffocating haze of dust blown from Mongolia, the famous Huáng Hé, known also in Mandarin, confoundingly, as both the Mother River and the River of Disaster.
Why is this so?
Because the world’s sixth-longest waterway functions as both yin and yang—alpha and omega—in China’s immensely long chronicles of memory. There is the river as cradle of culture: the source of Han civilization. And there is the river as sepulcher of skulls: 2,500 years of recordkeeping suggest the unruly stream has flooded, often catastrophically, at least 1,600 times. As many as four million lives were washed away in a 1931 flood alone. (Lately, however, drained by massive irrigation projects, it sometimes never reaches the Bohai sea.)
A riverside shrine evokes China's historic connection with this stream of memory and forgetting.
Out of Eden Walk
The coarse sand along the riverbanks is cornmeal yellow. The dry catkins of river reeds, swaying like pale pennants in gritty air, are parchment yellow. The fur of wild hares bounding from the currents’ edges is yellowed as old grass. And above, through the dirty storm, a blister of sun burns flame-yellow. But the Huáng Hé, the Yellow River itself, is green green green—or rather, a milky matte-jade, inflected by amoeboid, bottle-green wave shadows, and sprinkled throughout with diamonds.
Faded deities and mythological creatures, such as Lei Gong, the god of thunder, adorn an abandoned shrine on the banks of the Yellow River.
Paul Salopek
“So many wars here,” says Luo Xin, my walking partner and a brilliant writer and professor of history from Peking University.
I ask Luo to name them.
Not breaking stride, he ticks off the wars between the Three Kingdoms more than 2,200 years ago. And then the Han-Xiongnu war of the second century B.C. And Liu Bobo’s later campaigns against the Qin empire. And the Tang versus Northern Song dynasty. And the Ming frontier wars. More recently, there was the Chinese civil war and the war against Japanese aggression. The Yellow River’s silted waters sucked away casualties from them all.
Brother Luo is an artist as much as an academic. The river’s age-old cargoes of woe make him fall silent.
Faded deities and mythological creatures, such as Lei Gong, the god of thunder, adorn an abandoned shrine on the banks of the Yellow River.
Paul Salopek
“So many wars here,” says Luo Xin, my walking partner and a brilliant writer and professor of history from Peking University.
I ask Luo to name them.
Not breaking stride, he ticks off the wars between the Three Kingdoms more than 2,200 years ago. And then the Han-Xiongnu war of the second century B.C. And Liu Bobo’s later campaigns against the Qin empire. And the Tang versus Northern Song dynasty. And the Ming frontier wars. More recently, there was the Chinese civil war and the war against Japanese aggression. The Yellow River’s silted waters sucked away casualties from them all.
Brother Luo is an artist as much as an academic. The river’s age-old cargoes of woe make him fall silent.
Pitching tents on the banks of the Yellow River—a rare camping experience on the trek through China.
Liu Lifeng
“There is a famous poem,” he adds, finally. “It is about the bones of men who died on the Yellow River, and how their wives and lovers are still waiting for them. I will find you a good translation.”
But as we plod on, Luo Xin, who has many other things besides to occupy his mind, forgets. I will never know the poem. And camping that night next to the colossal slide of waters, I will startle awake at first gray light, not knowing where I am, nor the sound of my own name.
