Topographically, North China comprises mainly the North China Plain and the Loess Plateau. The Loess Plateau, separated from the North China Plain by a series of ranges such as the Taihang Mountain, is the second of China's three topographical cascades.

The North China Plain, in the frst cascade and closely related to the Loess Plateau topographi-cally, has taken shape on the basis of the Loess Plateau. The loess piled on the plateau is home to rich minerals, with the Yellow and other big and small rivers carrying the loess to the plains. This shows the North China Plain cannot be de-veloped without the Loess Plateau.[1]

The Loess Plateau is unique in size (more than 300,000 sq km) and thickness of the loess (the highest being 100-200 m). With loose-textured gray and yellow soil and erosion caused by winds and rain for ages, the plateau displays a landform not found anywhere else in the world.

The landform includes mainly loess tablelands, loess ridges and loess hills, with the tableland being the original loess plateau surface. Since the tableland has a dense dis-tribution of villages, it is hard now to find stetches of loess tableland on the Loess Plateau. The loess ridge is between two valleys and could develop into separate loess hills when divided further. The loess landform is thus called "a world created by the crazy god." Among the many reasons given for the formation of the loess, a popular one is that the loess is the dust piled up gradually after being blown by strong west winds from the Central Asian deserts over hundreds of thousands of years.[2]

In pre-historic days, the Loess Plateau was heavily forested with extensive grass on the highland and small areas with trees in relatively lower places. But thousands of years of human activities have destroyed the grasslands and forests, and ruthless winds and rain have beaten down and eroded the plateau, creating thickly dotted valleys of different sizes. Seen from planes, the vlleys look like branches of a big tree in a unique pattern.

The loess soil contains a lot of calcium carbonate. It is usu-ally hard but turns into soft mud during the rainy season and flows with rainwater. That's why the Loess Plateau sees the most serious loss of water and soil in China. Rainwater carries huge amounts of loess and sand into the Yellow Riv-er, making it the river with the highest concentration of mud and sand in the world. The Yellow River carries an average of 1.6 billion tons of silt to its lower reaches every year.

Apart from the Yellow River, many of its tributaries and distributaries, such as Weihe, Jinghe, Fenhe, Sushui and Yanhe rivers also run through the Loess Plateau. The valleys shaped by rivers like the Fenhe and Weihe are suitable for growing wheat and cotton, and have become the most afflu-ent areas on the plateau.

Note: 

[1] Cave dwelings are traditional architecture on the Loess Plateau.

[2] The natural landscape on the Loess Plateau is characterized by crisscrossing gullies.