Chapter 1 Asia as Cultured Space 19the shifting sands, suddenly swallowed whole by a black hurricane, not to be
rediscovered for a thousand years or more until early in the twentieth century.
Rivers
If you examine map 1.2, it looks as if the Indian continent plunged into
Eurasia like a bull, plowing its two horns deep into the continent, pinching the
ranges that emerged in the west and in the east; these eastern and western
“pinches” are the sources of Asia’s nine greatest rivers.
Part of the romance of great rivers is that they have single “sources” that
can be sought and named, around which mythologies can grow and pilgrim-
ages can focus. In fact, all rivers are vast drainage systems whose true source,
say in the case of the Yangzi, is its 700,000-square-mile basin. Yet, the headwa-
ters of the Huanghe, Yangzi, Red, Mekong, Salween, and Irrawadi can be
traced to a series of parallel gashes in the Tibetan and Qinghai (Chinghai)
mountains; at one point the Mekong, Salween, and Yangzi are separated by
only 40 miles (see map 1.1).
The distortions of the earth’s surface caused by the Great Collision gave
China most of its geographic features: more mountainous terrain and less ara-
ble land (11 percent) than any of the world’s large nations. An older east-west
range bisects central China almost to the Pacific. This range is the watershed
dividing the two great river systems, the Huanghe and the Yangzi, and dividing
China into its two critical ecological and cultural regions, North China and
South China. North of these mountains, winters are cold, wheat grows better
than rice, and for peasants working the powdery soil, life is hard. By contrast,
South China is subtropical, with abundant rainfall, hilly green land, tea, bam-
boo, water buffalo, and two or more crops of rice a year. For centuries North-
erners have imagined the south as a lush and sensuous place, but also a
dangerous region of “southern barbarians.”
“China’s Sorrow” is the nickname given to the treacherous Huanghe, or Yel-
low River, that cuts a northern loop through the upland plateau of powdery soil,
and then descends to the low-lying North China Plain. The Yellow River gets its
name from the ochre-colored soil called loess that has been blowing into the
North China uplands from Inner Asia for thousands of years, reaching a depth
of 400 feet in some areas. This soil, as fine as talcum powder, has been gradually
raising the bed of the river, which now is contained only by dikes built along its
edges. The result is that after centuries of dike building, the river is actually
higher than the surrounding terrain. Chinese historians have counted that it has
broken its banks 1,573 times since 602 B.C.E. (roughly every year and a half).
Building these dikes to protect farmers from floods has been considered the
duty of rulers since ancient times. According to Sima Qian, a court historian
writing in the first century B.C.E., a woman named Jiandi (Chien Ti) found a
blackbird egg while taking a bath. She ate it, became pregnant, and gave birth
to a son, Xie (Hsieh), who grew up and went to work controlling the floods.
This engineering achievement was considered the foundation of Chinese civili-