Scientific study of China’s great flood could prove 4,000-year-old legend
Researchers find evidence of truth behind legend, with findings that could trim centuries off founding date of first dynasty
Many people died some 4,000 years ago when a major earthquake jolted Jishi Gorge, a deep, rocky Yellow River valley in what is now Qinghai province.
But aside from the immediate death toll, centred in the Guanting Basin several kilometres downstream, with some people buried at the entrances to collapsed cave dwellings as they tried to flee, it was a prelude to an even greater catastrophe – China’s great flood.
The timing, the location, the magnitude ... all matched well to the legend that had been passed down for thousands of years
One landslide trigged by the earthquake plunged into the Yellow River, forming a 200 metre high dam, higher than today’s Three Gorges Dam on the Yangtze. It completely blocked the flow of China’s second-largest river and in the following six to nine months up to 12 billion to 17 billion cubic metres of water built up behind the dam.
It then collapsed, sending a torrent of water 500 times the average natural flow through Jishi Gorge hurtling more than 2,000km downstream. It “ranks globally among the largest freshwater floods of the Holocene”, according to a research paper published in the latest issue of Science magazine on Friday.
For the first time, science has provided evidence for China’s great flood, as important a part of Chinese legend as the biblical story of Noah is in the West.
