structural:reformatting, linguistic:translation
In culture

A traditional belief was that the Yellow River flowed from Heaven as a continuation of the Milky Way. In a Chinese legend, Zhang Qian is said to have been commissioned to find the source of the Yellow River. After sailing up-river for many days, he saw a girl spinning and a cow herd. Upon asking the girl where he was, she presented him with her shuttle with instructions to show it to the astrologer Yan Junping (嚴君平). When he returned, the astrologer recognized it as the shuttle of the Weaving Girl (Vega), and, moreover, said that at the time Zhang received the shuttle, he had seen a wandering star interpose itself between the Weaving Girl and the cow herd (Altair).

The provinces of Hebei and Henan derive their names from the Yellow River. Their names mean, respectively, "North of the River" and "South of the River", although the border between them historically has never been stable, and currently the border between Hebei and Henan is not the Yellow River, but the Zhang River instead.

Traditionally, it is believed that the Chinese civilization originated in the Yellow River basin. The Chinese refer to the river as "the Mother River" and "the cradle of the Chinese civilization".During the long history of China, the Yellow River has been considered a blessing as well as a curse and has been nicknamed both "China's Pride" and "China's Sorrow". In the twentieth-century, the river became a symbol of the rising Chinese nation in the face of Western and Japanese imperialism.

Despite Yellow River having a central role in the development of Chinese civilization on North China Plain, flooding and constant rerouting of the river have also caused many great disaster to population along the river for long, hence it is also known as a River of disaster (Chinese: 灾难河), with the disaster brought by the River said as history of disaster in the development of Chinese civilization, and the management of Yellow River have been a great political trouble to various Chinese dynasties throughout the history since ancient time.

Sometimes the Yellow River is poetically called the "Muddy Flow" (濁 流; 浊 流; Zhuó Liú). The Chinese idiom "when the Yellow River flows clear" is used to refer to an event that will never happen and is similar to the English expression "when pigs fly".

"The Yellow River running clear" was reported as a good omen during the reign of the Yongle Emperor, along with the appearance of such auspicious legendary beasts as qilin (an African giraffe brought to China by a Bengal embassy aboard Zheng He 's ships in 1414) and zouyu (not positively identified) and other strange natural phenomena.