Ling Zhang is an Assistant Professor of History at Boston College, Massachusetts. She was a Ziff Environmental Fellow at the Center for the Environment at Harvard University, Massachusetts and a postdoctoral fellow in the Program of Agrarian Studies at Yale University, Connecticut. She is currently working on a book project entitled China's Sorrow or the Yellow River's Sorrow: Environmental Biographies of a River Community.

• Prologue. 1048: the opening of an environmental drama; Part I. Pre-1048: Prelude to the Environmental Drama: 1. Before the Yellow River met the Hebei Plain; 2. The state's Hebei project; 3. The 1040s: on the eve of the flood; 4. Creating a delta landscape; Part II. Post-1048: The Unfolding of the Environmental Drama: 5. Managing the Yellow River-Hebei environmental complex; 6. Life in the Yellow River Delta; 7. Agriculture: a subsistence-oriented economy; 8. Land and water: a thousand years of environmental trauma; Epilogue. 1128: the close of the environmental drama; Index.

'If you want a striking, documented, and even lyrical account of why the Yellow River is called 'China's Sorrow,' this is the book for you. Full of hydrological wisdom, fateful decisions of Northern Song imperial officials, a river with 'agency' of its own to spare, human tragedy, deep environmental history, and vivid voices from a millennium ago, it is bound to have cross-disciplinary reach. Let's call it a landmark study of a river.' James C. Scott, Yale University, Connecticut