1931 Yangtze floods drowned cities the size of kingdoms
From June to August 1931, Yangtze–Huai floods smashed Chinese cities after years of drought flipped into melt and rain. Water covered about 180,000 square kilometres—an area likened to England plus half of Scotland—and ranks among history’s deadliest disasters.
The weather lined up with unusual cruelty. After the 1928 to 1931 drought and a bitter winter that piled snow and ice in the mountains, meltwater reached the middle Yangtze just as heavy spring rain began. Instead of the usual three separate high-water seasons, the valley got one unbroken deluge, and by June low-lying families had already fled. Nine cyclones struck in July alone, against a typical two a year, and four stations logged more than 600 millimetres of rain that month. The river rose higher than at any point since records began in the mid-19th century, and some rivers stayed out of their beds until November.
On 19 August the gauge at Hankou stood 16 metres above normal. Wuhan, already crowded with refugees, lost its defences when a dike failed just before dawn on 27 July, leaving about 782,000 people homeless and parts of the city submerged for nearly three months; some 30,000 camped on a railway embankment. On 25 August the Grand Canal tore through dikes by Gaoyou Lake, and in that county alone 18,000 drowned and 58,000 more died of hunger and disease the following year. Eight provinces, from Anhui and Hubei to Henan and Shandong, bore the worst damage.
Death tolls remain contested. Buck's surveyors believed their count was under a quarter of deaths in the first 100 days; an official report cited 2 million deaths from drowning and hunger; Chinese historians led by Li Wenhai reached 422,420 from press reports; some Western sources claim 3.7 to 4 million. Cholera, measles, malaria and dysentery killed more than the water did, and a 1932 cholera outbreak was officially tied to nearly 32,000 deaths.
T.V. Soong's National Flood Relief Commission, run day to day by the British expert John Hope Simpson, drew in the League of Nations, the epidemiologist Wu Liande and even Charles and Anne Lindbergh, who surveyed the flood zone from the air.
Source: 1931 China floods
