This book explores the human-engineered flooding of China's Yellow River, and how it affected the state, environment, and inhabitants of the region.

Ling Zhang is an Assistant Professor of History at Boston College, Massachusetts. She was a Ziff Environmental Fellow at the Center for the Environment at Harvard University, Massachusetts and a postdoctoral fellow in the Program of Agrarian Studies at Yale University, Connecticut. She is currently working on a book project entitled China's Sorrow or the Yellow River's Sorrow: Environmental Biographies of a River Community.

Prologue. 1048: the opening of an environmental drama; Part I. Pre-1048: Prelude to the Environmental Drama: 1. Before the Yellow River met the Hebei Plain; 2. The state's Hebei project; 3. The 1040s: on the eve of the flood; 4. Creating a delta landscape; Part II. Post-1048: The Unfolding of the Environmental Drama: 5. Managing the Yellow River-Hebei environmental complex; 6. Life in the Yellow River Delta; 7. Agriculture: a subsistence-oriented economy; 8. Land and water: a thousand years of environmental trauma; Epilogue. 1128: the close of the environmental drama; Index.