Yu the Great, the hero who tamed the flood

Yu (禹), known as Yu the Great (大禹), is the hero of the great flood. His story, 大禹治水, "Yu the Great controls the waters", is found in texts of very different kinds, which are best kept apart:

• myth, above all in the Shanhaijing (山海经), with a god, a magic soil and a strange birth;

• the tradition of the classics, the Shangshu (尚书, "Book of Documents"), the Mencius (孟子) and Sima Qian's Records of the Grand Historian (史记), in which Yu is the man the ruler Shun (舜), successor to Yao (尧), charges with stopping the waters, then the founder of the Xia dynasty (夏);

• archaeology, which has yielded no document from the time when Yu is supposed to have lived, but a much later bronze that names him.

In the early 20th century the "Doubting Antiquity" school, with the historian Gu Jiegang (顾颉刚), argued that Yu was originally a god or a creature connected with water, who became a man only later in the tradition. The Shuowen jiezi, a dictionary of about 121 CE, does define the character 禹 as the name of a creature, a "bug". Caricatured as "Yu was a bug", the thesis was opposed by other historians. With no document close to Yu's supposed time, the earliest form of his legend cannot be established.

Every account begins with Yu's father, Gun (鲧), and his failure. They do not tell it the same way.

In the Shanhaijing, in the chapter "Hainei jing" (海内经), everything happens between Gun and the god on high, the Di (帝): "The floodwaters rose to the sky. Gun stole the Di's swelling soil (息壤) to dam the flood, without waiting for the Di's order. The Di ordered Zhurong (祝融) to kill Gun on the outskirts of Feather Mountain (羽山)." The text adds that "from Gun, Yu was born" (鲧复生禹), then that "the Di at last ordered Yu to spread the soil and settle the nine provinces". This magic soil, the xirang, keeps growing by itself.

In the Shangshu, in the chapter "Yao dian" (尧典), the story becomes political. The ruler Yao asks who can bring the waters under control, waters that cover the hills and rise to the sky; everyone names Gun. After "nine years, the work had not succeeded", and Gun is punished at Feather Mountain.

Sima Qian's Records of the Grand Historian, in the 1st century BCE, follow this version in the chapter "Xia benji" (夏本纪): Gun fails for nine years; Shun, then governing in Yao's place, sees the failure and has him put to death at Feather Mountain, then gives the task to his son Yu.

Tradition contrasts father and son by their methods. Gun is said to have raised dikes along the banks without getting the better of the water; Yu opens channels, dredges the riverbeds and leads the waters to the sea. The texts, as the Chinese Wikipedia sums up, put Gun's failure down to blocking the water and Yu's success to guiding it.

The ancient texts stress this second gesture. The philosopher Mencius (4th century BCE) describes Yu who "opened the nine rivers" and "dug the ground to lead them to the sea": the waters flowed in their beds again, those of the Yangtze (江), the Huai (淮), the Yellow River (河) and the Han (汉). He draws a lesson from it, against someone who drained his floods into neighbouring states: "Yu controlled the waters by following the way of water", which is why he used the four seas as his drain.

The Huainanzi (淮南子, 2nd century BCE) tells the same work under Shun, with a variant: it is Gonggong (共工) who stirred up the flood, and Yu "opens" the three rivers and five lakes to let the waters flow to the Eastern Sea. On the Yellow River, the Longmen passage (龙门), also called "Yu's Gate" (禹门口), is where, according to tradition, Yu had the mountain opened.

The "Heavenly Questions" (天问) of the Chuci, attributed to Qu Yuan, were already asking why the Di punished Gun, and what Yu achieved where his father had failed.

Yu's best-known trait is his devotion, and Mencius reports it twice. In the chapter "Teng Wen gong I" (滕文公上), after describing his works, he writes: "At that time Yu spent eight years away; three times he passed his own door without going in. Even had he wished to till the land, could he have done so?" The example shows that those who govern for everyone cannot also farm their own fields. In the chapter "Li Lou II" (离娄下), Mencius pairs Yu with Ji (稷), the master of agriculture: both "passed their doors three times without going in, and Confucius praised them".

The numbers differ from text to text. In Sima Qian, Yu, grieved that his father had been punished for failing, wears himself out at the task: he "lived away for thirteen years and, passing the gate of his house, did not dare go in". Other accounts add details: married only four days earlier, Yu leaves to fight the waters; the first time he passes his home his wife is giving birth; the third time, his son is more than ten years old.

Today the scene is told as 三过家门而不入, "passing one's own door three times without going in": Yu puts the task entrusted to him before his family.

The "Tribute of Yu" (禹贡, Yu gong), a chapter of the Shangshu, turns the flood hero into a geographer. It opens: "Yu spread out the land; following the mountains, he cut down the trees; he fixed the high mountains and the great rivers." The text then goes through nine provinces: Ji (冀), Yan (兖), Qing (青), Xu (徐), Yang (扬), Jing (荆), Yu (豫), Liang (梁) and Yong (雍). For each it describes the work on the waters, the kind of soil, the rank of its land and taxes, and the goods sent as tribute. Then come the courses of the mountains and rivers, and five concentric zones of five hundred li around the capital. The text closes on a black jade tablet and the words "he announced the completion of his work".

Tradition dates the text to the Xia; most scholars think it much more recent, from the 5th century BCE at the earliest, and many place it in the Warring States period. It nonetheless shaped the way China pictured its territory, and 九州, "the Nine Provinces", became a way of saying China. Sima Qian already trusted it: for the mountains and rivers of the Nine Provinces, he writes, "the Shangshu comes closest"; as for the monsters of the Yu benji (禹本纪) and the Shanhaijing, "I dare not speak of them".

In the tradition, Yu is rewarded: Shun yields the throne to him, and Yu becomes the founder of the Xia dynasty (夏); after him his son Qi (启) succeeds him, and rule becomes hereditary. Whether the Xia existed at all is debated: the page "Origins: from the Neolithic to the Xia" covers the chronology proposed in 2000 and the Erlitou site.

As for Yu himself, no text or object from the time he is supposed to have lived mentions him, and neither do the Shang oracle-bone inscriptions. The oldest known witness is a Western Zhou bronze, the Sui Gong xu (遂公盨, also called the Bin Gong xu, 豳公盨), a ritual vessel for grain. It was acquired in 2002 by the Poly Art Museum in Beijing on the antiquities market, so it does not come from an excavation. Its 98-character inscription, dated to around the 9th century BCE, opens with the words "Heaven ordered Yu to spread out the land", after which Yu regulates mountains and rivers. The phrase closely echoes the opening of the "Tribute of Yu". It shows that the story of Yu and the waters was already told under the Western Zhou, centuries before the classical texts. According to the English Wikipedia's summary, the inscription names Yu but says nothing of the Xia.

Finally, in 2016 a team led by Wu Qinglong (吴庆龙) dated to about 1920 BCE a giant outburst flood on the Yellow River, caused by the failure of a natural dam in the Jishi Gorge (积石峡). Its authors suggest it may lie behind the flood story and point to a historical core in the tale of Yu: this is a hypothesis.