Yellow River

The founding story of Chinese statecraft is a flood story with an unusual ending. Gun was set to control the waters and tried to dam them, failed, and was executed; his son Yu succeeded by dredging channels and letting the water run to the sea, working for thirteen years and passing his own door three times without going in. For that he received the throne and founded, in the traditional account, the first dynasty. The moral is repeated for three thousand years afterwards: legitimate authority is what can manage water, and a ruler who cannot is one heaven has abandoned.

The river carried gods as well as politics. He Bo, the Earl of the River, received sacrifices in the Warring States period, and the best known story about him is its abolition: the magistrate Ximen Bao, told that a girl was drowned each year as the river god's bride, sent the shamans who organised it into the water to carry his message, and the practice ended. The story circulated as a model of the official who puts an end to a costly cult, and its persistence says as much about later attitudes as about the rite.

The oracle bones of the late Shang, excavated from Anyang in the river valley, record divinations addressed to a river power along with the high god Di and the royal ancestors, so the cult is attested in the earliest Chinese writing there is.

Every modern Chinese government has inherited Yu's test. David Pietz's history of the river in the twentieth century traces how the imperative to control it survived the end of the empire and became a central project of the republic and then of the People's Republic, absorbing enormous labour and capital and carrying much of the state's claim to competence.

Two episodes mark the extremes. In 1938 the Nationalist government breached the dykes at Huayuankou to slow the Japanese advance, flooding an enormous area and killing on a scale that is still estimated rather than counted. In the 1950s the Sanmenxia dam was built on Soviet advice, silted up far faster than predicted, and had to be rebuilt twice. By the 1990s abstraction upstream was leaving the lower river dry for weeks at a time before it reached the sea.

The ritual dimension has not disappeared; it has been nationalised. Ceremonies at the tomb of the Yellow Emperor at Huangling in Shaanxi, on the loess plateau the river cuts through, were revived from the 1980s and are now attended by state officials as an act of national ancestral commemoration, drawing both mainland and overseas Chinese participants. What was once a dynasty's sacrifice for the mandate is performed as a nation's claim on its own antiquity, and the river remains its setting.