Song Dynasty Yellow River Floods Devastate Northern China

1071

The Yellow River, that perpetual menace, breached its dikes again, inundating vast stretches of Hebei and Shandong provinces. Hundreds of thousands of peasants were displaced; harvests drowned under yellow silt-water. The disaster strengthened Wang Anshi's argument that the state must intervene - must build, must plan, must tax the wealthy to fund the infrastructure that nature kept destroying. His opponents saw the flood as heaven's judgment on precisely those ambitions.