This is a love story. Most love stories, however, are bound to be punctuated by disasters, both natural and manmade. The Chinese have been infatuated with the Yellow River since the mythic age of Yu the Great. Every dynastic ruler premised his mandate on the state's capacity of “ordering the water” (p. 7). And not just any water. It had to be the Yellow River, the “cradle of Chinese civilization,” no matter how much silt perennially drained into the river as it completed its Big Bend around the Loess Plateau. The inundations of the Yellow River made and remade the North China Plain, reinforcing the latter's role as China's political center despite the plain's inherently unfavorable biophysical conditions. Waters rose, dynasties fell, and maintenance costs climbed steeply along with the river's dikes, which ruptured nonetheless. This exhausting cycle finally broke down in 1855, when the Yellow River violently changed its...

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