The Concrete Expression of Folk Tales at the Yellow River Ferry and the Struggling Spirit of the Chinese Nation

As a vital geographical landmark and cultural symbol of Chinese civilization, the Yellow River ferries have fostered a system of folk narratives that carry the collective memory of the nation. These stories, taking the ferry as the spatial narrative origin, transform the Chinese nation's fighting spirit in natural conquest, ethnic survival, and cultural inheritance into embodied literary expressions through multiple themes such as heroic epics of water control, practices of ferrymen groups, and narratives of shipping struggles. This paper systematically examines the pioneering, resilient, and collaborative ethos embedded in the Yellow River ferry tales from three analytical dimensions: geospatial narrative, symbolic characterization, and cultural metaphor decoding. It further reveals its modernity inheritance value as a national spiritual and cultural gene.