The Yellow River: The Problem of Water in Modern China

David A. Pietz's The Yellow River is a scholarly environmental history examining the river's flooding, engineering management and cultural significance across modern Chinese history, published by Harvard University Press and written by a historian specializing in China's environmental and technological history. Its authority rests on close archival work with Chinese government and engineering records documenting how successive regimes managed, and periodically failed to manage, the river's catastrophic flood risk. As a study centered on the modern period and on state engineering policy, it treats the river's older religious and mythological significance, including its association with sacred and demonic river-deity traditions, as important context rather than as its own central focus, a distinction readers seeking primarily religious history should keep in view.