Some Yellow River floods were so severe that they changed the course of Chinese history. In 1048, as we will see below (here), a giant inundation profoundly altered the topography of the northern plain, while the catastrophe of 1099–1102 saw ‘corpses of the dead filling the gullies and numbered in their millions’, according to an appalled local administrator who saw ‘no sign of human habitation for over a thousand li’.
