Make of the Land: China

 

Make of the Lands: Geographic Overviews

 

China

If you look at the map of China, one of the first things that catch your eyes could be its eastern coastal line that bulges out to the ocean, the Yellow sea in the north facing the Korean Peninsula and the East China Sea in the South from Shanghai down to Hong Kong. It may well be prone to the risk of over-simplification to say the China, the eastern part of the country to be exact, is geomorphically a huge alluvial fan out of the silts from the Tibet Plateau, yet it may be carrying a good insight into the formation of Chinese civilization stemming out of its geographical features. The Yellow Sea is called so since the olden time because the sea looked yellow on Chinese side from the muddy water the river pours out to the sea. Yellow River, or Huang He, is one of the many rivers that derive from Tibet Plateau and it is not the biggest by any measure, yet the river has always been given the most repute because it was the birthplace of the Chinese civilization, serving as the center stage of its early history.

Imagine you are going on a rafting excursion down the Yellow River, about 5,500 kilometers or 3,700 miles long, from its origin on Tibet Plateau. You will start the journey from a highland area with many shallow lakes at the eastern end of Kun Lun Shan Mountains, 4,600 meters or 15,000 feet high above the sea level and will have to travel several straight days to get out of the whitewater. Then as soon as you hit the plain area, you will find yourself running between the high cliffs on both sides on the rolling water that is already beginning to look turbid. You have run to the east for days before you come to pass the city named Lanzhou. Now You have run about 1,165 kilometers so far from the starting point in the highland, but still it is 1,520 meters above the sea level.

Here it would be worthwhile to take a look at the location of this riverside city. Sitting at the south end of the Hexi Corridor, so called for its shape of the long flat strip of land that looks like a huge natural corridor, that served as best available path for caravans between China and the West through the land of the Uighur, called Xinjiang these days, Central Asia and the Middle East, has the ancient Chinese capital Xian about 650 kilometers to its east. The silk passed this city and the porcelains at later days to the west, but the caravans also carried various commodities and materials from the west on their way back and, along with them, the ideas, technologies, talents and cultures. The first idea of glazing was born in the Middle East but it never went beyond the level of glazing tiles. It took one thousand years before Chinese consummated the glazing technology to make celadon with the kiln capable of maintaining 1300 degrees with the help of the ash, without which the glazing would require 1700 degrees centigrade to produce. They were able to develop the kiln with the bricks that had been introduced from the Middle East long ago and the rich wooden resources, which the Middle East lacked, joined to see the advent of the refined glazed celadon. Much later it was through this route they came to learn about, and import, the pigment that can survive the ultimate temperature to render the adorable blue color, called Cobalt, for the blue-and-white porcelains. Marco Polo passed this city when he entered China one millennium ago. And about one hundred of years later, the blue and white porcelains came to be popular.  

For now, the river, which is already muddy enough, keeps running to the north to become more faithful to its name making a big loop passing by Gobi Desert to its north and then circumventing the Huangtu Plateau, a huge loess area with its soil layer 50 to 100 meters thick. It turns south when it has gotten as muddy and yellow as it can be. We are now in mountainous area again and the river makes waterfalls as the valley runs narrow. It is called Hukou Waterfalls, which is regarded as one of the signature sceneries of China, thus landing on the Renminbi bank note. Roughly from here the river is entering the area called North China Plain, where forms the China Plain, or Mainland China, along with the South China Plain watered by the Yangtze River.  About 250 kilometers downstream from the waterfalls you come to pass by Xian and Luoyang to the south, the two most important capital cities before the first adoption of Beijing as capital in early 13th century by the Mongols. The tomb of the First Emperor of Qin, third century B.C.E., famous for its colossal size and the thousands of terra cotta warriors, was discovered in 1974 in the suburb of Xian. There also is sitting a shrine a Han dynasty ruler built in the 2^nd century BC in dedication to the legendary being Yellow Emperor, who, according to the Chinese myth, founded the country about five millennia ago. About 370 kilometers to the east is sitting the city Luoyang, the center of the world trade at the times of eighth and ninth centuries AD, with more than one million in population already then under Tang dynasty. It may signify a lot that Xian, which can be said to have been the first power center for unified Chinese polity in the history was situated deep inland about 900 kilometers from its nearest sea coast. Down the road of history, the capital moves eastward alongside this river to get closer and closer to the ocean, but never to be coastal.

   Sanmenxia Dam 三門峽大壩

      Back to our imaginary journey on its final lag to the east and the sea, we will soon meet the huge dam named Sanmenxia sized over seven hundred meters long and one hundred meters high. The dam was completed in 1960 by the then fledgling Chinese communist government for multiple purposes including the electric power generation, but the catch phrase written on the huge concrete mass in red Chinese characters, 黃河安瀾 國泰民安, Yellow River Under Control, Nation Safe, People Comfortable, makes its primary purpose clear. The problem of muddy water is that it raises the river bed constantly by way of accumulation of sediments. As the river bed rises, the flood takes place more easily and often, deluging the basin area. The life of the original river stream thins out as the elevation of the river bed gets close to that of the basin area. The runoff water over levees makes another stream somewhere else creating a new river course. This natural phenomenon is what had happened in the lower part of Yellow River for thousands of years and is still continuing. From the beginning of the Chinese history, the water control of Yellow River was top priority mission given the rulers, so the first two kings in the legendary era, Yao and Shun, extant about forty-five hundred years ago, according to the legendary story, passed down the throne based on the ability to control the river, not by biological lineage. One of the designed functions of the dam was to make the water clear by depositing the mud to stop the vicious cycle of sediment accumulation and runoff-water deluge in the downstream areas. The ambitious goal did not take long to prove unamenable again as the dam gets known to cause flooding upstream entailing re-engineering and renovations after several arrests for reasons of publicity mishandling.

     Now the river travel by the Anyang city, where the oracle bones of Shang dynasty (1600-1046 B.C.E.), which carried the inscriptions that are believed to be the rudimentary from of the Chinese character Hanji, were unearthed in massive amount in early twentieth century. The last province the river passes before it meets the sea is Shandong province, which protrudes towards the Yellow Sea. As soon as you enter this last province of this long rafting journey, you come to pass the home of the Longshan culture, the oldest found in China mainland south of the Great Wall. And then about 150 kilometers further down along the river you come to pass the hometown of the great teacher Confucius of around sixth century BC. From here only a travel of another 150 kilometers will take you where the river gushes out its thick muddy water finally to the Yellow Sea finishing one round of its job of erosion and elongated depositing. It was observed that the silts the river delivers to its coastal destination produce 500 square kilometers of new land every twenty years. Less than three hundred kilometers away across the sea from the east end of this Shandong province is the west coast of Korea.

Yangtze river or Chang Jiang, “Long River” translated word for word, is the world’s third longest and seventh largest in terms of discharge volume. This river also initiates from Tibet Plateau and goes south circumventing Sichuan Province to water the South China Plain before its discharge to East China Sea at the Shanghai Estuary. The Yangtze basin area is 1.8 million square kilometers, more than twice that of Yellow River. Warmer than its northern counterpart it is further blessed with 1,100 mm of yearly precipitation, most by way of summer monsoon, compared to 450mm of the Yellow River basin in the north. So, since it came to be incorporated to the Chinese polity, it has served as the major source of the national wealth through agriculture in the olden time and by way of modern industry and trade these days. Cities such as Nanjing, Wuhan, and Hangzhou, the city that amazed Marco Polo with its abundance of porcelains and precious spices, are sitting by this river or in its basin area. Its estuary area harbors very important sea ports for international trade from olden times, such as Ningbo and Yangzhou, as they were situated closer to the Southeast Asian countries and India and ultimately to Europe via the sea route. Its importance increased dramatically when the grand canal was built between Hangzhou and Beijing, making the nation more coherent and stronger, during 7^th century AD by the Sui dynasty, whose achievements laid the pavement to the prosperity of Tang dynasty that followed its short-lived court.  Today The Yangtze delta area supports 400 million people and 40% of China’s economic activity. Yangtze river does not have that much of sediment issue as Yellow river, still the flood has been a big problem because of the concentrated precipitation during monsoon. The Xianxia Dam or Three Gorges Dam, located about 360 kilometers upstream from the city Wuhan, is the largest hydro-electric dam in the world, with 29 billion tons of water containing capacity producing the biggest. It once was observed discharging 50,000 tons of water a second in a flood season.

The agricultural area the two rivers irrigate is called the China Plain. Chinese thought this area was the center of the world and the struggle of dynasties for more than two millennia was about defending this land from the invasion of the “barbarians” and obtaining the control of this area to be able to proclaim themselves as the ruler of the “All Under Heaven”. China has a land area of 9.3 million Km², which is slightly larger than the U.S. land area of 9.1 M.  Among them the Plateau of Tibet accounts for 2.5 M Km², roughly the 30% of the total area. With the average elevation of 4,500 meters above sea level, most of the plateau is above the timber line and not fit for human inhabitation. Yet it originates the two most important rivers of China, who has to feed 20% of world population with 7 % of the global precipitation. Nothing briefs the importance of the huge highland to China better than its nickname “Water Tower of China”,  though it should not justify the its forceful merger of Tibet.  It needs to be noted here that the Plateau of Tibet serves as  the origin of two other important rivers for Southeast Asian countries, the Mekong River and Salween River.

China also has the huge area of deserts, occupying 27.4 % of the land. Of the 11 discrete deserts Gobi is the biggest and the global climate change combined with the over-grazing of the steppe area is accelerating the desertification process. Located mostly north of the Great Wall, they are the source of the sandy wind that blankets the northern Chinese cities, notably Beijing, and travels as far as Korea and part of Japan causing respiratory troubles to many every Spring time. To the northeast of the Great Wall is located Manchuria. 

          Chinese dynasties did not have the full control over this area until its last dynasty Qing established by the Jurchen people who had been based in the area before they conquered the China of Ming Dynasty in 15^th century AD.  Ironically, the conquest of China by the Manchurians effectuated the merger of their land to China.  And it was during this last dynasty that the merger of the land of the Uighur people, now called Xinjiang, which means “New Territory” in Chinese, and the annexation of Tibet to make the Chinese territory as it is today from the original China Plain, which was less than half the current China in the area count.

As result the modern-day China shares borders with 14 countries by land. The list includes Russia, India, North Korea, Mongolia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Nepal, Bhutan, Myanmar, Laos and Vietnam. By sea it shares borders with the two Koreas, Japan, Philippines, Brunei, Malaysia, Indonesia, Vietnam and Taiwan, all of whom have territory-related disputes with China.