Du Fu once wrote in the "Traveling Night Book": "The stars are hanging in the plain and the wilderness is wide, and the moon is gushing with great rivers." "In the course of our thousands of years of history, the development of civilization has never left the existence of river systems. A mighty Yangtze River with twists and turns, a surging deep Yellow River, and a number of water systems that nourish the earth, they not only bring colorful nature and wonderful environment, but also spread the seeds of China farther.
Worldwide, the Yangtze River has the third longest length in the world and has a basin covering nearly one-fifth of the continent' area. The Yellow River is the fifth longest river in the world, with a water flow of 2571 cubic meters per second. Their staggering amount and length of water have helped us tremendously, but what many people don't know is that there is another river on the mainland that is larger than the Yangtze River and has 7 times the amount of water than the Yellow River.
Looking at the northeasternmost part of the mainland, Heilongjiang Province sits quietly in this cold zone. The reason why this province has such a name is precisely because there is this Heilongjiang River flowing slowly in its territory. Because the river contains a large amount of humus, it appears black, and it is precisely because of this that it has obtained such a name, and there is already a record of "Heilongjiang" in the "History of Liao".
However, the Heilongjiang River seen in the mainland today is not the whole picture, and its name is not only this one. The river mainly originates in the Kent Mountains of Mongolia, and there is a small branch source from the Daxing'an Mountains. The source of this mongolian river is called the "Erguna River", which was named "Wangjian River" in the Old Book of Tang.
It has different names in different periods, for example, in the "Secret History of Mongolia", it has the name of "Ergune". During the Yuan Dynasty, it was called "Yeli Guna River", and the Ming History records that during the Ming Dynasty, he was called Aru Nalian, and it was not until the Qing Dynasty that it was uniformly called Erguna. For a long time, it was a unique inland river on the mainland, until the lower reaches were demarcated by Russia in the late Qing Dynasty, and the upper and middle reaches were used as national borders in 2004.
In the heyday of the Heilongjiang River, together with the Erguna River in Mongolia and the Shilekha River in Russia, it would have been more than 5,400 kilometers long and had a basin of more than 1.85 million square kilometers. In contrast, its basin area is already larger than the Yangtze River, and the amount of water it contains has made the Yellow River lose.
Such a huge river can be said to be a precious treasure. Before the Qing Dynasty, this territory had always been valued by the emperors, whether it was for the garrison of the border plugs or the valuable resources contained in it, it was irreplaceable. Unfortunately, in 1858, the Qing imperial family, which was already in decline, was extremely weak to the invading Tsarist Russia, and eventually the glory of the river was greatly weakened.
In this black water, there are extremely rich resources such as coal and gold, and the huge hydropower is an excellent place to generate electricity. Once in the Wei and Jin dynasties, it was even called "weak water", and such a romantic name doomed the river to be extraordinary. Fortunately, Heilongjiang has now been properly developed, and despite its ups and downs, it has never been forgotten by its people.
Shi Yun: "The cold wave enters the mirror of the autumn river water, and the high shore frost forest is against Ziyang." "In the world, Heilongjiang is still one of the world's top ten rivers. The vast water system will always be the mother of civilization, and now it is getting better and better with the help of science and technology, and it has shown its former glory step by step.