The Story of China: The Epic History of a World Power from the Middle Kingdom to Mao and the China Dream

by Michael Wood

For a time, Chinese advances in military technology kept them ahead. China, after all, was the leader in mechanical siege engines, rocket and projectile launchers and flame throwers and the like. But in the course of the eleventh century these technologies inevitably crossed frontiers, and, as in today’s world, once that happened, the advantage of being the sole possessor of certain hardware was wiped out.

Through China’s history the decline of dynasties has been as much due to climate and environmental change as civil war or foreign invasion.

And as we can see from the prayers to the Great River on Shang oracle bones to the reports of Communist Party hydraulic engineers, for a state based in the Yellow River plain, the control of the rivers and water systems was absolutely central.

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.

100 miles to the north, the people of Hebei, for whom the river had never featured in their lives save in myths, were caught completely by surprise – ‘Flushed away, turned into food for fish and turtles.’ It was a natural disaster on a huge scale, flattening and sweeping away thousands of homes and villages; over a million people were killed or became refugees.

the damage was so comprehensive that when the waters subsided ‘eight or nine households out of ten migrated out of Hebei’.

From autumn 1048 through 1049, standing waters were left in so many places that three seasons of crops were ruined; three harvest failures that led to apocalyptic stories of starvation and cannibalism.

the numbers were too great to cope with, and as the squalor of the camps grew, sickness was rife, and outbreaks of disease soon added to the horror: as the local prefect in Qingzhou observed, ‘relief operations done in the name of saving people ended up killing them’.

The immediate impact of the disaster was so huge that for several years the government had to ship grain from the south to help the starving north.

Though we single out wars and rebellions as changers of history, the effects of environmental disaster can be no less long-lasting.

The 1048 flood destroyed the indigenous water systems of huge swathes of northern China, in places erasing centuries of communal channel and dyke building, and in the end undermining the stability of the Song state.

Rebuilding, where it was possible, took an enormous effort, and it was the local authorities who took the initiative to try to mitigate the succession of disasters: rebuilding towns and villages; organising the locals to dig relief canals and construct embankments.

Typical was the small town of Quzhou in the central plain of Hebei, where the flow of rivers from the mountains to the west collided with the new course of the Yellow River, causing heavy damage and loss of life.

Aside from the loss of life, the cost of restoring the infrastructure and rebuilding ruined settlements, canals and embankments was huge. The millions of bundles of wood, clay and straw that were used like sandbags to block breaches in the dykes accelerated local deforestation.

little known to them, this was not the end, for the 1048 flood was the beginning of a cycle of natural disasters.

Longer term, the issue was not only a problem of flooding, but of soil fertility. It might have been thought that the silt was good for the fields, but the Yellow River’s silt contains a huge amount of desert sand from the rocky landscapes of the loess plateau, not thick rich black soil as for example in Egypt.

‘After the Yellow River’s waters recede sediments are a fertile glutinous soil in the summer. But then it turns into a yellowish dead soil in t...

From that point, so locals judged, a heavy silt cover can make the land sterile for twenty years.

This disastrous situation only began to change for the people of the Hebei region in 1128, when the dykes were deliberately broken as a defence measure by the Song government and the river shifted its course again southwards.

In places in the north, twelfth-century travellers had the impression of journeying through a desert, and even two centuries later some counties were st...

The once rich city Daming is now one of the poorest districts in China, as the environmental disaster of the eleventh century has continued to influence later generations, something today’s world will find easier to understand as climate events become more and more frequent.

South of the river, untouched by the flood, the capital of Kaifeng was still the golden city, its markets overflowing, festivals lighting the streets, though its population was now swelled by thousands of refugees.

His tale has a Shakespearean grandeur: Wang had effectively ruled China, accepting his Confucian responsibility to help the emperor care for the people, and had spent his life working in public service. Then, however, disillusioned, he devoted his last years to a search for inner truth.

Wang decided that serious reforms were needed if the nation was to progress, and sent a memo to the government: the Ten Thousand Word Memorial. One of the most famous documents in Chinese history, it was debated even during the communist period, as it called for the wholesale restructuring of government and society.

The reforms he instituted were the most radical in the whole of the pre-twentieth-century history of China, and they ran right across the board. He tackled education, the economy, taxation, trade and the examination system. He looked at practical subjects too, providing loans to farmers and heavier taxes for wealthy landowners. There was also a war on corruption, that perennial issue in Chinese bureaucracies of every period.

Maybe his health was already undermined by the pressure of pushing through the reforms; as Deng Xiaoping remarked, ruefully, after listening to Jimmy Carter’s remarks about the knotty problems of American politics: ‘You should try ruling China!’