The Wuding River (Chinese: 无定河) begins in the

Ordos Desert The Ordos Desert () is a desert/steppe region in Northwest China, administrated under the prefecture of Ordos City in the Inner Mongolian Autonomous Region (centered ca. ). It extends over an area of approximately , and comprises two sub-des ...

Shaanxi Province Shaanxi (alternatively Shensi, see § Name) is a landlocked province of China. Officially part of Northwest China, it borders the province-level divisions of Shanxi (NE, E), Henan (E), Hubei (SE), Chongqing (S), Sichuan (SW), Gansu (W), ...

Inner Mongolia Inner Mongolia, officially the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region, is an autonomous region of the People's Republic of China. Its border includes most of the length of China's border with the country of Mongolia. Inner Mongolia also accounts for a ...

and flows south into

loess Loess (, ; from german: Löss ) is a clastic, predominantly silt-sized sediment that is formed by the accumulation of wind-blown dust. Ten percent of Earth's land area is covered by loess or similar deposits. Loess is a periglacial or aeoli ...

canyons and farmland. After around 100 miles it flows into the great

Yellow River The Yellow River or Huang He (Chinese: , Mandarin: ''Huáng hé'' ) is the second-longest river in China, after the Yangtze River, and the sixth-longest river system in the world at the estimated length of . Originating in the Bayan Ha ...

. The Wuding has its own tributaries, such as the

Dali River The Dali River ( zh, t=大里溪, p=Dàlǐxī) is a river located in Taichung, Taiwan, flowing from the west of the city in a southwest direction before emptying into the Dadu River. Since the river is prone to flooding after heavy rain, the c ...

, Hailiutu River, Hanjiang River, and the

Danjiang River The Dan River (), formerly known as the Dan Shui (丹水) or 800 ''Li'' Black River (八百里黑江), is a river located in Shaanxi province in the People's Republic of China. The longest tributary of the Han River, the Dan rises at Heilongkou ...

. The course of the river roughly parallels the northern route of the ancient

Silk Road The Silk Road () was a network of Eurasian trade routes active from the second century BCE until the mid-15th century. Spanning over 6,400 kilometers (4,000 miles), it played a central role in facilitating economic, cultural, political, and rel ...

, now the National Highway 210.

History

The river's name means "winding" or "unstable" or "capricious" or "without a fixed course". This relates to its shifting course during classical times. The river area was much contested in classical times, and many battles were fought along and around it. On its early northern reaches stood the 'White City' of Tongwancheng, the main Hun capital on the non-Chinese side of the

Great Wall of China The Great Wall of China (, literally "ten thousand ''li'' wall") is a series of fortifications that were built across the historical northern borders of ancient Chinese states and Imperial China as protection against various nomadic grou ...

. The river served as a military boundary into the warlord period of Chinese history, when opium replaced cotton as the crop on the river's fertile loess farmland, and into the modern communist period. The river currently carries very high levels of silt due to the arid climate in its loess canyons and gulleys, and over the last 30 years extensive effort has been put into preventing erosion on the upper reaches of the river, so as to prevent coarse sediment from entering the Yellow River. Terraces, re-forestation, planting and control dams have all been tried, with considerable success.

Cultural references

An ancient 9th century battle poem is set on the banks of the river - Chen Tao's ''Journey to Longxi'' describes a warrior dying on the river bank, whereafter his lover only sees him in her dreams... :"Have pity on the white skeletons of the Wuding River, for they are men now only in the dreams of young women." The river and its culture gave rise to the

bardic In Celtic cultures, a bard is a professional story teller, verse-maker, music composer, oral historian and genealogist, employed by a patron (such as a monarch or chieftain) to commemorate one or more of the patron's ancestors and to praise t ...

folk song Folk music is a music genre that includes traditional folk music and the contemporary genre that evolved from the former during the 20th-century folk revival. Some types of folk music may be called world music. Traditional folk music has ...

tradition of daoqing. By the late 19th and 20th centuries, this had taken the form of large troupes of blind storytellers and musicians. For more on this tradition see: "Blind Bards of The Wuding", in ''China Pictorial'' Nov 2006.

History

Cultural references

Further reading