Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
it was badly compromised. The natural ability of the river to control its
course declined at the same time that the sediment load rose and the
population grew. In 1048 a major breach of the Shanghu
商胡
d i k e (t of d a y
a lake in the northeastern Henan city of Puyang
濮陽
) led to a massive
course change, its first in a thousand years, and one of fifty Yellow R iver
floods during the Northern Song.
32
In the wake of the 1048 flood, some one million people died or fled.
Another million people died in a subsequent flood in 1068, and smaller
floods occurred frequently.
33
The region around the new course became
waterlogged, salinated, and deforested in the wake of the floods.34
34
he
area around the millennium-old course had already suffered the same
outcomes, and a legacy of ecologically destructive land use compounded
flooding there. Cities and market towns declined along tributaries that
became dry or clogged with silt.
35
In order to determine the effects of the course change on the orga-
nization of the political landscape, we have conducted a spatial analysis
based upon two integrated datasets. The first is the DGSD. The other is a
hydrological dataset that we developed that includes the pre- and post-
1048 courses of the lower Yellow R iver, the middle and upper courses, a
seventy-five-kilometer buffer on either side of each of those courses, and
a larger hinterland around each course. We arbitrarily circumscribed
the northern hinterland based on provincial and international boundar-
ies and defined the southern hinterland to approximate the area of the
northern one and to encompass similar floodplain terrain. The creation
of two equal-area hinterlands allowed us to compare the density of the
state presence in two regions. We also cataloged events of change to the
political landscape between the course changes of 1048 and 1126.
Spatial and temporal analysis, summarized in figure 5.7 and table
5.1, exposes several previously indiscernible characteristics of the late
Northern Song state presence in the lower Yellow R iver landscape.
First, it reveals the spatial distribution of the state presence. The new
course and the old course regions have distinctive political landscapes
and spatial histories, even though they are both part of a similar north
China plain ecology. The old course region - ecologically degraded and
of limited strategic significance - supported relatively few counties and
