Yellow, Yalu, Yangtze Trivia Quiz

Answer: Silt

These days, the Yellow River is badly polluted, but it's been yellow from time immemorial. As it wends its way through northern China, the river picks up vast quantities of a yellow soil called loess, and this silt gives its color to the water that carries it. The second-longest river in China, the Yellow carries a higher volume of sediment than any other river in the world.

Answer: Floods on the Yellow River were among the deadliest natural disasters ever recorded.

Silt -- loess -- gives the river its color, and loess makes the plains around it tremendously fertile. But loess also makes the river deadly. Sediment can collect in natural dams underwater, which release catastrophic amounts of water when they break -- or change the river's course unpredictably. (Ice dams, far upstream, pose similar dangers.) Some stretches of the Yellow River are actually elevated above the surrounding countryside, due to loess buildup and levee construction, so floodwaters don't recede back into the river.

Famine and disease travel in the wake of floods, raising an already terrible death toll. By some estimates, millions died in the floods of 1931, and the Yellow-River basin had the largest share of those deaths. Another half-million Chinese peasants died in the flood of 1938, but that was no natural disaster: the Nationalist armies had broken the levees deliberately, in an effort to halt a Japanese advance.

Answer: Hebei and Henan

Students of Chinese history may recognize the words for "north" and "south" from the names of the northern capital (Beijing) and southern capital (Nanjing). Hebei, entirely north of the Yellow River (Huang He), surrounds the cities of Tianjin and Beijing and doesn't actually border the river that gives it its name.

Henan, meanwhile, is mostly south of the river, though the Huang He cuts off its northernmost quarter. More than 140 million people live in the two provinces, with over 90 million in Henan alone.

Answer: About 180 miles (300 km) southeast of Beijing

The Yellow Sea is in the northeast corner of China, reaching up between mainland China in the west and the Korean peninsula in the east. At the northern end of the Yellow Sea, Korea Bay bites slightly into North Korea, and the three-lobed Gulf of Bohai takes a much bigger bite of China.

The mouth of the Yellow Sea sits between Bohai Bay (to the northwest) and Laizhou Bay (to the southeast); it's the former which is the closest big body of water to Beijing, the national capital. Incidentally, Bohai Bay is also home to substantial petroleum deposits, which are likely to make this region even more vital to China.

Answer: North Korea

The Korean peninsula stretches southeast of the Yalu River, with South Korea at its tip and North Korea closer to the bulk of mainland Asia. Its position has made the Yalu the site of several battles, as well as of more one-sided actions; during the Korean War of the 1950s, the Chinese destroyed most of the bridges across this shallow waterway, to make their border more defensible. Today, refugees from the repressive North Korean regime make the northward crossing in hopes of a better life.

Answer: Its whiteness

Koreans call the mountain Baekdu San, or "white-headed mountain"; the Chinese call it Changbai Shan, or "ever-white mountain." At 2,744 meters (9,003 feet), it's the tallest mountain in its range (and in the entire Korean peninsula), which makes its snowcapped slopes all the more impressive. The volcano erupted about a thousand years ago, leaving a massive caldera. That's where Heaven Lake sits, legendary home of the Tianchi (Heaven Lake) Monster.

Water leaves the lake via a beautiful 68-meter (223-foot) waterfall, which feeds the Yalu River (among others). This is where the river starts on its path to the Yellow Sea.

Answer: The Tibetan Plateau

The Tibetan Plateau -- sometimes nicknamed "the roof of the world" -- is huge, with an area of some two and a half million square kilometers (almost a million square miles). The Kunlun Mountains are to the north and the Himalayas are to the south, with several other mountain ranges present for good measure. The average altitude of the plateau exceeds 4500 m (14,700 feet). "Staggering" is a good word for it.

On a plateau like this, it's not surprising to find lots of snow, lots of ice, and lots of glaciers. Snow melt feeds many of China's great rivers; the Yangtze is no exception. There's some dispute over exactly which snow-fed tributary should count as this river's source; the traditional choice isn't quite as far from the mouth as a tributary mapped by explorers in 2005. There's no dispute, however, that this river at the heart of China springs from Tibet.

Answer: Lake Poyang

Lake Poyang, in Jiangxi Province in southeastern China, covers more than 3500 square kilometers (1300 square miles) during the rainy season, with an average depth of 8.4 meters (27.6 feet). Several rivers flow northward into the lake, chief among them the Gan, the Xiu, and the Xin; at the northern end of the lake, the waters merge into the Yangtze. The endangered finless porpoise makes the lake its home, and numerous species of migrating birds spend time there.

The Battle of Lake Poyang lasted more than a month in the early fall of 1363. The Yuan Dynasty was in its death throes, and several groups were battling for control of China. Han rebels took a fleet into the lake to besiege a Ming town, Nanchang; Ming rebels launched their own fleet in order to break the siege. After a bloody first few days at the end of August, with heavy use of fireships, the two sides mostly watched each other before finishing things up in on October 4. The result was a decisive victory for the Ming. Zhu Yuanzhang, the Ming commander during this battle, became Emperor of China just five years afterward.

Answer: Hong Kong

Hong Kong is on China's southern coast, between the South China Sea and the Pearl River Delta. The Yangtze, which at about 6300 km (3,900 miles) in length is the longest river in Asia and the third-longest in the world, flows west to east substantially north of there.

If you were traveling downstream on the Yangtze, Chongqing is the first of the incorrect choices that you would reach. One of five national central cities (as designated by the Chinese government), Chongqing is a river port and manufacturing center. Nanjing, the off-and-on (currently off) capital of China, would be next on the trip; Westerners may know it better by its former transliteration, Nanking. The trip must end at the great city of Shanghai, which sits at the river mouth on the East China Sea.

Answer: The Three Gorges

Here, downstream of Chongqing, the Yangtze flows through three magnificent gorges in succession. The first, Qutang Gorge, is only 8 km (5 mi) long. The Wu Gorge, at 45 km (28 mi) long, comes next, followed by the 66-km (41-mi) Xiling Gorge. It's this last gorge that is now home to the massive Three Gorges Dam, a hydroelectric plant designed to generate more than 22,000 megaWatts from turbines turned by flowing river water. The dam's other major advantage is in its ability to even out the flow of river water between rainy and dry seasons, by building up a reservoir and then slowly letting the water out. This improves shipping on the Yangtze and gives some protection against devastating floods.

Sadly, these great benefits are paired with great drawbacks. More than a million people were displaced by the construction of the dam and the flooding of the reservoir, and their compensation and relocation have not been handled well by the Chinese government. The area has been inhabited for thousands of years, and despite efforts to move archaeological sites and artifacts where possible, a project like this inevitably erases important evidence of the past. Sediment has trouble getting past the dam, so that there's too much of it in the reservoir and too little reinforcing the farms and cities downstream. Finally, the dam is in a geologically active zone. The devastation that an earthquake might cause by rupturing the dam and releasing the reservoir beggars the imagination.