Loess Plateau

The Loess Plateau, (l=Yellow Earth Plateau), is a abbr=on plateau in north/northwest China with an elevation of abbr=on, located around the southern half of the Yellow River's Ordos Loop and the valleys of its two largest tributaries, the Wei and Fen Rivers. The Loess Plateau covers almost all of the provinces of Shaanxi and Shanxi and extends into parts of Henan, Gansu, Ningxia and Inner Mongolia. It was enormously important to Chinese history, as it formed one of the early cradles of Chinese civilization and its eroded silt is responsible for the great fertility of the North China Plain, along with the repeated and massively destructive floods of the Yellow River. Its soil has been called the "most highly erodible... on earth" and conservation efforts and land management are a major focus of modern Chinese agriculture.