Ruth Mostern's The Yellow River: A Natural and Unnatural History is a pioneering work in integrating digital methods, maps, and a historian's analysis of text to study the long-term relationships between the Yellow River and human activities. Mostern covers a 3,000-year time span and shows the continuities and changes in ecology, topology, hydrography, and climate pattern, as well as population, land use, politics, warfare, and ethnic tensions in the Yellow River watershed. Comprehensive and accessible, this book is the definitive work for anyone who wants to study the general history of the Yellow River or to dive into specific topics in historical geography and environmental history. This book makes important contributions to the study of the Yellow River's history, following recent works by Ling Zhang, David Pietz, and Micah Muscolino.Footnote ¹

No other scholar has written a biography of the Yellow River over three millennia, and in that regard, Mostern's book is groundbreaking. Skillfully synthesizing existing scholarship on the Yellow River history, Mostern structures her book around a sequence of life spans. She clearly identifies the turning points in the river's life and develops an epic life story of the river. In so doing, she gives a voice to the Yellow River and emphasizes the river's defining role in the human history within its watershed.

The book has four chapters, in addition to an introduction and an epilogue. The introduction provides an analytical framework for seeing the Yellow River watershed as an interconnected hydrosocial system. Chapter 1 gives an overview of the geography, ecology, and climate of the upper reaches, middle reaches, and the lower floodplain of the Yellow River. Chapters 2, 3, and 4 are organized chronologically, describing three life spans of the Yellow River.

The first life span, discussed in chapter 2, covers the period from Neolithic times to the tenth century CE, when a relatively small population and limited human activity in the upper reaches of the river had not yet caused severe land degradation and sedimentation in the downstream of the river. The second life span, analyzed in chapter 3, lasted from 750 to 1350. This period witnessed the key turning point of the Yellow River watershed around the tenth century. It was then that the state prioritized warfare against the northern pastoralists and people colonized the frontier intensively, resulting in drastic changes in the river's course and fast soil erosion on the Loess Plateau. The last river life span, discussed in chapter 4, is the late imperial period, when anthropogenic activities turned the river and its floodplain into a highly engineered waterscape and the sediment in the river had reached an unprecedented level, culminating with the disastrous river course shift in 1855. This final life span was when the river became “China's sorrow,” a notion, according to Mostern, that was quite recent, defying the idea of a disaster-prone Yellow River in the more distant past (pp. 10, 237). The epilogue briefly discusses the management of the Yellow River in the twentieth century and argues that the human intervention of the river systems could be both the cause and solution of environmental problems.

Mostern's book takes a “whole-basin and sediment-centered approach” (p. 6). While most works on the Yellow River's history focus on segments of the river or the floodplains, Mostern studies the entire basin and analyzes the relationships among the headwaters, the middle reaches, and the lower floodplain. Furthermore, she historicizes the river's sediment and emphasizes how the formation and transportation of that sediment had transformed the floodplain. Throughout the book, Mostern recognizes that the natural characteristics of water and soil went beyond the human control. She writes, “in the end, it was the inexorable deposit of sediment from the eroded Loess Plateau, not any failures of engineering or administration, that doomed late imperial floodplain hydrosystem to collapse” (p. 238). By focusing on the river's sediment and erosion processes, Mostern shifts from a water-centered narrative and provides a new perspective to understanding the ecological transformation of the entire river basin.

It is worthwhile to note that the book extensively discusses the role of climate change in the long history of the Yellow River. Drawing on climatic proxy data, including tree rings, ice cores, lake and peat sediments, and glacier fluctuations, Mostern shows how the climate influenced vegetation patterns, human settlements, and farming and pastoralist activities in the ecologically diverse river basin, as well as how the history of moisture (“a composite of temperature and rainfall, a proxy for the rate of vegetation growth,” p. 27) interacted with the human management and disaster events throughout the river's long history. When climate models cannot explain geological and ecological changes in the basin, as Mostern points out, “human activity is the driving mechanism” (p. 29).

At the core of Mostern's digital method is the Tracks of Yu Digital Atlas (TYDA), which Mostern uses effectively to analyze and visualize the long-term human-river relationships in the Yellow River watershed. The data not only show the correlation among human management events, disaster events, and the mean moisture level of a given time period, but also generates versatile maps that trace the changes and continuities of the river course and its watershed. In the appendix, Mostern and her collaborator, Ryan Horne, describe how they and their team sorted historical sources, extracted relevant information from those sources, designed the TYDA database of “3,754 spatially and temporally referenced events” (pp. 15, 251), and visualized the results. Their work in collecting and analyzing the digital data spanned ten years. The Yellow River: A Natural and Unnatural History is an important achievement that took years of efforts and diligence in developing an innovative way to research the Yellow River history.

Mostern's book is an exemplary work of digital methods and multidisciplinary approaches to the study of environmental histories. Its digital methodology is largely based on published sources, and occasional incoherence in the data and its analysis can occur as a result of bias and errors inherited from those sources. The continuous construction and improvement on the existing database will contribute significantly to the scholarship on the Yellow River in the making.