Few rivers in human history have been so closely tied to a nation’s destiny as the Yellow River—Huang He, the “Mother of China.” Rising in the Tibetan Plateau and meandering nearly 5,500 kilometers to the Bohai Sea, it has nourished farmlands and given rise to early Chinese civilization. Yet the same river has been a source of immense suffering, earning the grim title “China’s Sorrow.” Its floods, often caused by the accumulation of fine loess silt that raises the riverbed above the surrounding plains, have repeatedly transformed prosperity into ruin.
The Yellow River’s flooding history reads like a recurring national tragedy. Ancient Chinese records detail countless inundations and course changes that wiped out towns and dynasties alike. The flood of 1887, near Zhengzhou in Henan Province, was among the deadliest natural disasters in recorded history. The river broke through its embankments, drowning more than 900,000 people and devastating the heart of northern China.
Soldiers of the National Revolutionary Army wade through flooded area of the Yellow River in 1938. Credit: Wikimedia Commons
In 1931, an even greater calamity unfolded when the Yellow River, the Yangtze, and the Huai all overflowed following torrential rains. Vast stretches of central and eastern China were submerged. The death toll from flooding, famine, and disease reached 2 million, and tens of millions were displaced.
By the late 1930s, the Chinese Nationalist government under Chiang Kai-shek had poured enormous effort into maintaining the dikes and controlling the river’s temperamental flow. But in 1938, facing the rapid advance of Japanese troops, those same defences were deliberately destroyed.
Turning the river into a weapon
When Japan launched its full-scale invasion of China in July 1937, its armies swept through the northern provinces, capturing Beijing, Tianjin, and Shanghai. By June 1938, the Japanese North China Front Army was pushing toward the rail junction of Zhengzhou and threatening to seize Wuhan, the wartime capital of Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist government.
Chiang’s army was greatly outnumbered, outgunned, and demoralized. The Japanese advance along the Longhai Railway, a critical east–west supply route, seemed unstoppable. To halt it, the Nationalists resorted to a desperate measure first proposed by local commanders—destroying the dikes at Huayuankou, a village on the southern bank of the Yellow River, to unleash a flood that would block the Japanese from advancing through central China.
Initial plans targeted other breach points near Kaifeng and Zhengzhou, but these were heavily guarded or technically difficult. Finally, after weeks of debate, the Nationalist high command approved the demolition at Huayuankou.
In early June, 1938, Chinese engineers and soldiers detonated explosives along the dike. When the blasts failed, peasants were conscripted to dig through the embankments by hand, using shovels and wicker baskets. Two days later, on June 11, the weakened dikes gave way.
What followed was one of the most catastrophic man-made floods in history.
Map showing the flooded region of Henan after the dikes in the Yellow River was breached. Map courtesy Micah S. Muscolino. Colourized for clarity.
Once unleashed, the Yellow River tore across the plains of Henan, Anhui, and Jiangsu. The river’s main flow shifted southward, abandoning its old course to the north and carving a new one that would remain in place until 1947.
Within hours, villages were swallowed whole. Fields that had just yielded early summer crops vanished beneath a churning inland sea. The flood spread across 50,000 square kilometers (some estimates say over 80,000), with depths reaching several meters in many areas.
The human toll was staggering. Entire families drowned as they tried to flee. Refugees clogged the few surviving roads, carrying bundles, livestock, and children. In the aftermath, between 500,000 and 900,000 people died—not only from drowning, but from starvation, exposure, and epidemic diseases like cholera and dysentery that followed in the flood’s wake. Over 3 million people were displaced, many of whom never returned to their ancestral homes.
The fertile farmlands of central China were rendered useless. Irrigation systems were obliterated. For years, even after the floodwaters receded, the land remained waterlogged and barren.
Strategic Outcome
Japanese Imperial Army soldiers in rescue operation of Chinese refugees as the result of the Yellow River Flood. Credit: Asahi Shimbun
The flood’s immediate effects on the battlefield were mixed. The Nationalists’ initial goal was to slow the Japanese army’s advance along the Longhai Railway toward Zhengzhou and Wuhan. In that narrow sense, the flood did not prevent Japan from taking Wuhan later in 1938. So contemporaries at the time saw it as a failure.
However, the floodwaters made northern and central Henan impassable for years, turning the region into a vast swamp. This forced the Japanese army to abandon their plan to move westward into Shaanxi via the Tongguan Pass — the traditional corridor leading to Xi’an and then to Sichuan, where the Nationalist government had retreated.
By blocking that corridor, the flood essentially sealed off the western route and helped prevent Japan from ever launching a successful overland invasion into Shaanxi or Sichuan, both of which became crucial strongholds for China’s resistance movement.
Thus, in the long term, it protected China’s wartime capital region in the southwest and arguably contributed to the survival of the Nationalist government. However, this success came at an unbearable price. The human suffering that followed—hundreds of thousands dead, millions displaced, farmland ruined for years—overshadowed any military gains.
The Human and Political Fallout
Chinese refugees evacuate as the result of the Yellow River Flood. Credit: Asahi Shimbun
For the people of the flooded provinces, the disaster was apocalyptic. Survivors described seeing cattle and people swept away together, villages collapsing under the weight of the torrent, and bodies drifting for miles. Refugee columns stretched endlessly across the countryside, many headed toward cities already struggling under wartime shortages.
The Nationalist government, aware of the moral outrage the act might provoke, initially denied responsibility. Official communiqués claimed that Japanese bombing had destroyed the dikes. It was not until 1945, after Japan’s defeat, that Chiang Kai-shek’s government formally admitted to breaching the river as a military tactic.
The flood also deepened rural resentment toward the Nationalists. Peasants who had survived both the flood and Japanese occupation saw little aid or compensation from the government. In the war’s later years, the Communist Party capitalized on this bitterness, portraying itself as the defender of the common people against both foreign invaders and a callous regime in Nanjing and Chongqing.
Crowd of Chinese refugees of the Yellow River flood who were rescued by Japanese forces. Credit: Wikimedia Commons
When the war ended in 1945, the Yellow River still flowed southward through its wartime channel. Restoring it to its former course was an immense undertaking. In 1947, the Nationalists rebuilt the Huayuankou dike, redirecting the river north once again—a project that itself displaced thousands and caused fresh local flooding.
The legacy of the 1938 flood remains deeply controversial. To some historians, it represents an act of desperate patriotism, a last-ditch attempt to protect the nation’s heartland from conquest. To others, it stands as one of the gravest wartime atrocities committed by a government against its own people.
The Yellow River has changed course more than twenty times in recorded history, but few of those transformations were as violent or deliberate as the one in 1938. It was a moment when human warfare turned nature itself into a combatant, and when a river that had long symbolized life and renewal became an instrument of death.
References:
# “1938 Yellow River Flood”. Wikipedia
# “Huang He floods”. Britannica
# Diana Lary. “The Strategic Breaching of the Yellow River Dyke, 1938”. War in History
# Micah S. Muscolino. “A Militarized River: The 1938 Yellow River Flood and Its Aftermath”. The Ecology of War in China
# Ryan Mantle. “Examining the Consequences of the Yellow River Disaster, 1938-1947”. University of Washington Tacoma
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