Jia Lu Harnessed the YellowRiver

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From the Jin dynasty(1115-1234) to the early Yuan dynasty (1206-1368), the lower reaches of the Yellow River had no fixed river course and the levees of the Yellow River at that time was quite dilapidated, besides, there were many tributaries, and the changes of the course also had no regular pattern to conform.

In many cases, after the Yellow River was breached, it sometimes took over the natural courses of other rivers, and sometimes meandered aimlessly forward. From 1297 to 1307, the Yellow River began to enter the Biandao course of Sihe River near Xuzhou which became the chief channel of the river gradually.

In May 1343, the Yellow River was breached near Baimaokou in Caozhou. Before long, the river was breached again in Caozhou. Later in the basin there fell over 20 days of rain continuously, and the water level of the Yellow River rose sharply, reaching about 2 Zhang’s(about 6.66 meters) above the ground. The river was breached again near Baimaokou. In June the Yellow River was breached in the north side of Jindi, flooding for as long as 7 years and caused enormous damage. On the historic records there was such a sentence:”People in the area of thousands of li suffered from this flood.”At the same time, the floods overran northwards to the Anshan area and rushed along Huitong River and Beiqing River, which caused grave calamities to the counties in Jinan and Hejian that alongside Beiqing River. It even rushed the cities in Jiyang County (the present-day Heze City in Shandong Province) and Luzhi of Jining(the present-day Juye in Shandong Province) into ruins at last.

After the Yellow River was breached near Baimaokou, Jia Lu first inspected the flood situation as the Shandong Dao pacification commissioner and then he took up the post of the director of the waterways in 1348 and inspected the water conditions along the Yellow River. After careful inspection, he came forth two solutions: firs was to build levees on the new northward river course which had appeared due to the breach, thus fixing the new course, and this method was both time-saving and expense-saving; the second was to block the gap by force, making the river return to its original course. At that time, the courtiers discussed for long time on the twosolutions, and the counselor-in-chief decided at last to adopt the latter solution and appointed Jia Lu as the Minister of Works and the chief emissary for river regulation, responsible for the project of harnessing the YellowRiver.

In 1351, the project started, for which the government called up 150,000 civilian men and 20,000 privates. Seven months later the river-dredging project ofthe whole course was finished; in that August, Jia Lu organized people to force the water into its original course. Till November, the levee construction project completed and the gap was blocked.

Jia Lu’s success in controlling the floods that had lasted eight years in7 months was to a large extent attributed to his river regulating guideline of “both dredging up the river and blocking up the gap”. According to the historic records, Jia Lu used three methods to harness the Yellow River: dredging up the river course, cleaning the silts at the bottom of the river and blocking the gap of the levees.

Among them, cleaning the silts in the river could be seen as a means of dredging up the river course, which in turn also included four kinds: to excavate new course in the area that there was no water passing, thus straightening the river course; to make the riverbed of the existed river course much evener, lowering the higher areas and filling the lower places; to make the width of the river course reasonable; and to excavate water-discharging rivers to divert water.

Jia Lu made great achievements in harnessing the YellowRiver in the history and has always been praised by the later people. However, the project cost the people a high price. At that time, the Yuan dynasty (1206-1368) had been very corrupted and there were serious political crises. In the previous year before the project began, someone proposed that calling up 100,000 to 200,000 civilian men to regulate the Yellow River might cause tempest, and there already appeared children’s folk rhyme in Henan Province and Hebei Province that the Yellow River regulating project would cause turmoil in China, all of which indicated that a large-scale insurgence was going to come. And the prediction became true. In April the project began, and in May a man called Liu Futong started an uprising in Yingzhou. Thereafter Henan Province turned to chaos and the Yuan dynasty (1206-1368) was doomed before long.

Therefore, to the Yuan regime, this project touched off its destruction. However, the merit and demerit of any historic event could not be judged in a few words and there was also no fixed standard to judge.