Yellow Sea

The Yellow Sea is the name given to the northern part of the East China Sea, which is a marginal sea of the Pacific Ocean. It is located between mainland China and the Korean Peninsula. Its name comes from the sand particles from Gobi Desert sand storms that turn the surface of the water golden yellow. In Korea, the sea is sometimes called the West Sea.

Lowry would have sailed through the Yellow Sea en route to Dairen on his 1927 voyage to the Far East. Lowry refers to the sea in his first novel Ultramarine; "refuse was splashing from her rusty side into the Yellow Sea." (Pg. 24); "yellow sea of his consciousness?" (Pg. 25) and later the crew of the Oedipus Tyrannus discover a pigeon out the sea; "I wonder why it had a message from Swansea round its leg. It makes you think, that, doesn't it? In the Yellow Sea." (Pg. 33); "The Yellow Sea........and all of the seventy-seven seas, and more than seas, lie between us." (Pg. 133); and "Well we were in the Yeller Sea and a typhoon comes on and we was an empty ship and suddenly we see this old cow of a junk." (Pg. 174) . Lowry's poem 'The Glory of the Sea' is dated Yellow Sea August 1927.