ABSTRACT
For most of its rule the Qing court maintained a central bureaucratic organization to oversee conservancy of the Yellow River, the Grand Canal, and the Huai River. The Yellow River Administration (YRA) established in the early Qing was headed by a Director-General and staffed by thirty appointees from the central government. By the mid-eighteenth century the structure of the YRA continued to expand by splitting into two branches: the donghe and the nanhe. A commitment to the technological solution of higher dikes coupled with the ineffectiveness of the YRA led to a bottleneck in control. In its own dialectic, the Yellow River breached the protective dikes in Henan in 1855 and followed a northerly route to an outlet in northern Shandong. The problem with the Republican government after 1911 was that it simply could not command the financial resources necessary to conduct Huai River engineering.
