The Mighty Yellow

Over 5,000 kilometres long and flowing through nine provinces and autonomous regions, the Yellow River is China's second largest, after the Yangtze, while its basin is deemed the cradle of Chinese civilisation

The Tibetan name is "River of the Peacock", in Mongolian it is sometimes called the "Queen River", and ancient Chinese records have referred to it as the "Murky River", but for the rest of us, it can only be the Yellow River in Chinese. Regarded by scholars as a birthplace of ancient Chinese civilisation, the river and its tributaries flow past some of the country's oldest cities, including Lanzhou, Baotou, Xi'an, Taiyuan, Luoyang, Zhengzhou, Kaifeng, and Jinan. It has also flooded more than 1,500 times in the last 4,000 years, changing course ona dozen occasions. Today, the nearly 5,500-kilometre-long waterway irrigates as much as 15 percent of China's arable land, feeds around 12 percent of the population, and supplies water to more than 60 cities.

The Yellow River begins its epic journey across north-central China on the Tibetan Plateau in southern Qinghai province, crossing six other provinces (Sichuan, Gansu, Shaanxi, Shanxi, Henan, and Shandong) and two autonomous regions (Ningxia and Inner Mongolia) in its course to the Bohai Sea, the innermost extension of the Yellow Sea. About 1,900 kilometres east to west and around 1,100 kilometres north to south, the drainage basin is roughly 750,000 square kilometres – an area about twice the size of Japan.