This paper discusses variations in multi-time scales and characteristics of sudden-change, based on the annual runoff time series of 531 years (1470-2000) at Shanxian Hydrometric Station on the Yellow River. The study shows that the variant pro-cess of the sudden-change can be presented in different time scales with wavelet transformation and Lipschitz-exponent, which could clearly demonstrate many kinds of characteristics of the time series: jump, situation of sudden-change, distribution and type of sudden-change. The analysis also display that there are great 22 sudden-changes happened from 1470, of which 4 sudden-changes since 1950 have longer duration and they have greater influence than ever before in the time series. These results will have very important significance for feature research of the Yellow River.