The Yellow River changes its course, 11

The Yellow River changes its course

The Yellow River burst its dikes in Wei Commandery and cut a new channel to the sea, flooding the eastern North China Plain; famine and mass flight followed, and the disaster was taken as a sign that Wang Mang had lost the Mandate of Heaven.

Date

11year known

Place

Wei Commandery on the lower Yellow Riverapproximate locationtoday: Northern Henan and southern Hebei, China · East Asia

Participants

Xin dynasty, Wang Mang

Threads

East Asia in the 1st–5th centuries

Also known as

Yellow River flood of AD 11; Наводнение на Хуанхэ 11 года

In AD 11, the third year of Wang Mang’s Shijianguo era, the river breached its banks in Wei Commandery, left its Western Han channel and flowed through Pingyuan and Jinan to the sea near Qiancheng — the second great recorded shift in the course of the Yellow River. According to the Book of Han, Wang Mang had feared that a breach might flood his family’s ancestral tombs at Yuancheng; when the river turned east and the tombs were safe, the breach was left unrepaired. The plain suffered from floods for decades: only by AD 70 did the Eastern Han official Wang Jing lay out and regulate a new channel, which then served for several centuries without major breaches.

The floods, famine and migration affected what is now Shandong and northern Jiangsu, and both contemporaries and later historians connected the disaster with the peasant risings that brought down the Xin. At Sanyangzhuang in northern Henan archaeologists have excavated a Han village that a Yellow River flood of about this time buried under silt.

The Yellow River changes its course

Connections

Consequences

Same participants

Meanwhile in the world

Eastern Europe

Middle East and Egypt

Africa

South Asia

Southeast Asia and Oceania

North America

Latin America

The same period

Sources