cultural prosperity, geographical diversity, habitability, human settlement, population density, river density, Oceanography, GC1-1581, River, lake, and water-supply engineering (General), TC401-506

Abstract Human civilization prospers along rivers worldwide. Here, we investigated human–river relations by revealing the linkage between water and habitability for human settlements, and socioeconomic and cultural development across China. We found that human–water co‐occurrence relationships are self‐similar over sub‐basins for different scales of stream‐order in the river networks. According to the earlier complete demographic census conducted during the reign of the Qing Dynasty (1776), there has been a general tendency for inhabitants to live close to rivers, characterized by population density associated with habitability cored by water under a near‐natural state, which still remains to date (2019) even after long‐term population growth and human interventions. Throughout history, we have extended the linkage of human settlements to humanistic attributes with river networks, derived four different modes of human aggregation towards rivers, and elucidated the geographical diversity of river density, population density, cultural prosperity, and clusters of ethnicity, particularly the Western and the Northeast culture established in the arid (desert) areas, the Huaxia culture in the alluvial plains, the Loess/Nomadic/Southwestern Ethnic culture in the plateaus, and the Qi‐Lu/Wu‐Yue/Linnan culture in coastlands across the whole country. This work is also of significance to understanding long‐term human–water relationships at a global scale.