FLOOD IN CHINA.
terrible catastrophes in the history of floods have resulted from a break in the dykes during floods.
The natural result of the continual raising of the bottom is that where any serious breach occurs, it is simply impossible to repair it. So the great river has changed its channel entirely several times in the past two thousand years. In 1852 it burst through its banks three hundred and fifty miles from the sea, and cut a new channel through the northern part of the province of Shantung to the Gulf of Pechili, where it emptied nearly two hundred and seventy-five miles north of its former mouth in the Yellow Sea. The sharp angle at which it turned off is noticeable on the maps. This region being almost unknown to foreigners at that time, no one can say how many thousands or millions of lives were destroyed by “China’s Sorrow.”
But the greatest disaster of this sort occurred in 1887, when the heavy fall rains of the northwest provinces swelled the streams, and the Yellow River finally broke its banks at a sharp bend in the Ho-nan province, where the town of Cheng Chou is situated. Frantic efforts were made to close the gap, but in vain. It rapidly grew to a width of one thousand two hundred yards. Some distance away the yellow torrent turned into the valley of a small stream known as the Luchia, down which it rushed in an easterly direction, overwhelming everything in its path.
“Twenty miles from Cheng Chou it encountered Chungmou, a walled city of the third rank. Its thousands of inhabitants were attending to their usual pursuits. There was no telegraph to warn them, and the first intimation of disaster came with the muddy torrent that rolled down upon them. Within a short time only the tops of the high walls marked where a flourishing city had been. Three hundred villages in the district disappeared utterly, and the lands about three hundred other villages were inundated.
“The flood turned south from Chungmou, still keeping to the course of the Luchia, and stretched out in width for thirty miles. This vast body of water was from ten to twenty feet deep. Several miles south of Kaifeng the flood struck a large river which there joins the Luchia. The result was that the flood rose to a still greater height, and pouring into a low-lying and very fertile plain which was densely populated, submerged upward of one thousand five hundred villages.