Then, taking a sharp turn southward, it issues from the mountains with sometimes uncontrollable power, rushing down to its confluence with the Wei River and into the plains. There it enters the ‘Middle Land’, where it has changed course on at least thirty occasions in the historical period, bursting its banks in violent floods more than a thousand times, shifting its mouth on the Yellow Sea by as much as 500 kilometres, so that, incredibly, its mouth has been sometimes north, sometimes south of the Shandong peninsula.
