Hukou Waterfall

The whole Yellow River squeezed into a 20 metre spout

This is the world's largest yellow waterfall, and the colour is not a nickname. It is the Yellow River carrying its load of loess, going over a cliff.

The mechanism is a squeeze. The middle reaches of the river run through the Jinxia Grand Canyon, and as they approach Hukou Mountain the valley walls close in from both sides and the channel narrows abruptly to between 20 and 30 metres. Water that was spread wide has nowhere to go but faster, and it accelerates into a narrow opening in the cliff and drops. The fall itself is about 15 metres high and 20 wide, in a waterfall that overall exceeds 20 metres.

Its size changes with the calendar. The usual width is around 30 metres, rising to 50 during flood season, so the same place is a different scale of event depending on when you stand there.

It is the largest waterfall on the Yellow River and the second largest in China, after Huangguoshu in Guizhou. It sits exactly on the border between Shanxi and Shaanxi, 165 kilometres west of Fenxi County and 50 kilometres east of Yichuan County, roughly 400 kilometres from Xi'an.

Hukou literally means flask mouth, and the source describes the water as pouring down as though from a huge teapot.

Two oddities sit near the falls. Directly below is a shining rock the Chinese call guishi, the ghost stone, and what makes it strange is that it rises and falls with the water level: however high the river runs, some part of it stays visible. About three kilometres downstream an enormous rock splits the Yellow River in two, and the halves roar past on either side before rejoining. The Qilangwo Bridge crosses beneath the falls and joins the two provinces, and in sunshine the spray refracts into a rainbow standing over the water.

Hukou was named one of China's 40 Best national scenic spots in 1991. For a long time it was very hard to reach, stuck in the hinterland of the Loess Plateau, and visitor numbers only climbed once the local government put in roads and facilities.