Yellow river flood in 1887

The Yellow River (Huang He) in China is prone to flooding, because of the largely flat land around it. Numerous days of heavy rain combined with flat land around the river made were making it easy to swell over the riverbank. In 1887 floods devastated the area, killing between 900,000-2,000,000 people in process. It is considered one of the most deadly natural disasters in human history. For centuries, the farmers living near the Yellow River had built dikes to contain the rising waters. The rising riverbed overcame the dikes causing a massive flood in a nearby area. The waters of the Yellow River covered an estimated 50,000 square miles and swamped agricultural settlements. After the flood, over two million people were left homeless. The resulting pandemic and a shortage of basic provisions claimed as many lives as the ones caused by the flood itself.