Even the recent, unusually heavy rainfall pushed the water level up by less than half a metre.

'It's not as magnificent as I expected, and the water quality doesn't look so good either,' Ms Liu said after spending five minutes taking photos from a floating toll bridge in Jinan. Behind her, shallow brown water rushes through a channel engineered to hold water another two metres deeper.

Most of the 5.3 million inhabitants of Jinan, the capital of Shandong province, stopped thinking about the river years ago. A city park along the northern bank lacks the landscaping and maintenance common to riverside parks. Pump stations that used to divert water from the river, now high and dry, have been abandoned.

The river usually makes news locally only when someone dies after getting stuck in the mud while swimming.

Disappointed though she was, Ms Liu at least took note of the historic river - as residents of Jinan will soon be forced to do themselves. As local groundwater supplies decline, they will have to turn to the Yellow river again for their water.

But can she provide enough water? The question is debatable.

'We had water problems before and wondered what we could do,' said Qiao Meng, general manager of an upmarket Jinan coffeehouse. But now she is optimistic. 'This year there's been a lot of rainfall.'

Jinan people are already starting to look to the river. They expect the Shandong Yellow River Affairs Bureau to help the city by diverting water from the upper river into two mountain reservoirs. A precedent was set in September, when the bureau diverted 600 million cubic metres of water from the upper river to support autumn seeding in Shandong.

Now, between rain and water diversions, the river is running higher than it has for months - 300 to 400 cubic metres per second. 'I would say people are not too worried about [a water shortage] problem,' said Zhao Li, a consultant with the Jinan Times. 'They don't feel there is a water shortage.'

That may be wishful thinking. Usually, conversations in Jinan about the Yellow river are laced with tension. The river has run dry periodically throughout modern history, but this year is the worst on record. The flow from January to July is predicted to be 8.2 million cubic metres, 5.5 cubic million metres less than its previous worst dry season, in 1997, the China Daily reported in April.

Shandong needs about 16.6 million cubic metres of Yellow river water every six months.

The province of 90 million is growing at about 1.34 per cent a year, and growth is even faster in Jinan and other cities.

The director of the Shandong Yellow River Affairs Bureau said urban development, not population growth, could threaten the river. But he said Jinan was developing too slowly for this to become a concern.

Still, the city raised water rates by 25 per cent this year and plans to consult the public over whether rates should go any higher.

The problems run deeper than those admitted by Jinan officials, said Ma Jun, a researcher with Sinosphere, an environmental consulting company based in Beijing.

He said the city used to depend on its plentiful underground spring water, but the drought meant water had to be pumped in from the river. As the water table receded, Jinan would be forced to rely more on the river, Mr Ma said.