The Foreign Service Journal, July-August 2007

section of line as early as 1896, from Lukouqiao to Baoding, which the Belgians naturally incorporated into their track. The Belgians also made use of an 11-mile section from Lukou- qiao to the Qianmen Gate in Bejing, built by the French during the inter- national military occupation brought about by the Boxer Rebellion of 1900. The whole Wuhan-Beijing section of standard-gauge track comprises 817 of the 1,400 total miles of the Kowloon-to-Beijing rail line. One of the more intriguing parts of this route is the crossing of the Huanghe, or Yellow River, just north of Zhengzhou. Due to an elevated river bed in relation to the surround- ing terrain, the Yellow River is known as “China’s Sorrow”: 4,300 years ago, the Yellow flooded central China for 13 years, and such epi- sodes eventually led the Chinese to begin building dikes 2,500 years ago. The worst flood in human history occurred in 1887, when the waters of the Yellow River covered 50,000 square miles, killing 900,000 people and leaving two million more home- less. The Belgians rose to the engi- neering challenge of spanning these unruly waters in November 1905 by using screw piles to bridge the shal- low, mile-wide river, allowing them to reposition the bridge if it substan- tially shifted course during the annu- al floods. Bordering the south side of the river are multiple forested peaks crowned with temples and a Mount Rushmore work-in-progress. Sculp- tors are carving two massive heads of Yandi and Huangdi from one of the peaks in Di Yi Jing. The rock faces of the two legendary Han kings stand 106 meters high and are topped by two fluttering red flags. The first imperial court of the Han Dynasty (206 B.C.-A.D. 220), Xi’an (originally Changsha), home of 66 F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L / J U LY- A U G U S T 2 0 0 7 Due to the massive flooding it has so often caused, the Yellow River is known as “China’s Sorrow.” Typical rural brick village with pervasive smog in central China.