Dayudu: Lifting the Yellow River onto the Plain

Dayudu is a name on a riverbank. It is one of the old Yellow River ferry crossings of Rucheng county, named in the county's list of historic landings together with Fenglingdu. Rucheng is the southernmost county of Shanxi, under Yuncheng, 1,161 square kilometres in area, with its government at Guwei town; its land rises north into the Zhongtiao mountains and comes down south to the Yellow River, so the river is the county's southern edge. The name carries Yu, the figure Chinese tradition credits with bringing the floods under control, and a du is simply a crossing. The place is therefore named for a man who tamed rivers, at a point where a river has to be crossed.

The county's slope explains the problem. The land is high in the north, where the Zhongtiao mountains stand, and low in the south, where the Yellow River runs; the fields and the county town sit on the upper part of that slope, and the water sits at the bottom of it. Anything taken from the river for the fields has to be raised. A ferry landing is a place where the bank can be reached at all, which makes it the natural place to begin taking water up. Read the site as terrain first: an escarpment, a river at its foot, and a plain above that needs the river more than the river needs the plain.

Yuncheng is a flat basin with a mild climate and a long farming history; the Chinese account of the city calls it a traditional agricultural region. Water is the constraint. The basin's rainfall is 559.3 millimetres a year against an evaporation of 2,550, so what grows here depends on water brought in, and the Yellow River along the southern rim is the largest source available, though it lies below the fields. That is the whole argument for a lift at a crossing. The name Dayudu puts a legendary flood-tamer at exactly the place where the difficulty is visible: a landscape stating its own problem in three syllables.