Abstract
LONDON Royal Geographical Society, November 22.—Sir Roderick Murchison in the chair. A paper was read detailing the results of an exploration of the new course of the Hoang-Ho, or Yellow River, made in 1868, by Mr. Elias, a young merchant of Shanghai, illustrated by a map, the positions in which had been carefully laid down from observations taken by that gentleman. The Chinese records, which are very copious in relation to this turbulent river, mention nine changes of its course, dating from 602 B.C. to the last in 1853, during which its outlet has shifted from 34° to 40° north latitude, the present being the former mouth of the river Tsa-Tsing, in the Gulf of Pecheli. The gradual elevation of the bed of the river caused the waters to press against the upper portion of the embankments, and as neither the dykes were raised, nor the bed deepened, the waters effected a breach in 1851, which was enlarged in the following year, till in 1853 the whole stream flowed through the mile-wide breach, in a north and east direction, leaving the old course dry. From this breach at Lung-Menkau, the river flowed in an ancient bed for 52 miles, but from that point a tract 96 miles long was inundated to a width of 15 miles. Ruined houses, broken bridges in the midst of the waters, and the remains of the banks of two canals forming the northern and southern channels, and here and there vast stretches of mud—were all that told of a once fertile and populous district. The deserted houses were in many cases silted up to the eaves by the alluvial deposit. In the dry season fifteen inches of water were scarcely found in some places. At Yushan the waters converged into the bed of the former river, Tsa-Tsing, now usurped by the Yellow River. The Grand Canal crossed this flooded district, but its banks have been carried away and its communication to the north destroyed. Proceeding down, a broken bridge of seventy arches obstructed the stream it could not span. For 150 miles a fertile and garden-like country was passed through, to which succeeded a barren treeless waste, except for the belt adjoining the river, which was fertile and cultivated; the ground, however, even with the growing crops, and in one place the town wall, was undermined and carried away piecemeal by the encroaching river. A barren, marshy tract of reeds, tenanted by wildfowl, extended for about twenty miles from the sea. This change of course, has, it is said, cost the Chinese Empire fifty to sixty millions of its population, the country lying on the old course having been ruined by the drying up of the river, and that in the new by the floods. The new course is unfit for navigation. Vessels drawing six feet of water might cross the bar, and proceed with difficulty to Yushan, but none beyond.—Captain Sherard Osborn remarked that in 1818 the Chinese Censors had called the Imperial attention to the impossibility of effectually controlling the Yellow River; although the expense of the maintenance of the dykes had been quintupled. The maladministration which had resulted in this calamitous change could not, therefore, be chargeable to British interference with China. British engineers, if employed, would soon restrain the Hoang-Ho within due bounds, and utilise its waters for navigation and irrigation. The Chinese water-systems were beginning to be better known, and he hoped that the Upper Yangtse would soon be opened to our steamers, for every forward footstep of Englishmen would, he believed, be a blessing to China.—Mr. Wylie, the first Englishman who saw the results of the diversion of the river from its course, gave an account of his crossing the river bed, then become a sandy highroad covered with passengers, and some particulars of a journey made by him to the sources of the Han River, in which he identified the pass described by Marco Polo as the White Horse Pass.
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COPE, E. Societies and Academies . Nature 1, 117–122 (1869). https://doi.org/10.1038/001117b0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/001117b0
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