Then, on 19 July, at Puyang to the northeast of the capital, a 700-metre stretch of the embankments on the northern bank broke, unleashing a vast torrent that surged northwards over the wheat fields of Henan, obliterating all before it. Over the next days it widened northwards across the plain into Hebei, opening a new main channel and subsidiary flows, entering the sea nearly 700 kilometres away, near today’s Tianjin in the Gulf of Bohai, turning the course of the river thirty degrees counter-clockwise; one degree of latitude.
