Tamer of the flood and founder of the Xia dynasty
Yu the Great is the first king to stand at the border of legend and documented history. Tradition holds that he inherited his father Gun’s task of controlling the flood, switched from damming to dredging, passed his own door three times in thirteen years without going in, and at last tamed the waters and mapped the Nine Provinces; Shun abdicated the realm to him, his son Qi succeeded, and "the realm as public trust" became "the realm as family inheritance" — the beginning of China’s first dynasty, Xia. There is still no contemporary written proof that Xia existed, and archaeologists continue to debate how the Erlitou site corresponds to it, but "Yu taming the flood," as the prototypical story of political legitimacy, shaped four thousand years of the political imagination that "he who governs the waters governs the realm."
In thirteen years of flood control, Yu passed his own home several times without going in — one time, it is said, his wife of the Tushan clan had just given birth to their son Qi, and the infant’s cry could be heard through the wall. Retold across the ages, this detail became the first political model of "putting the public above the private": a ruler’s legitimacy comes from bearing hardship for the community, not from bloodline itself.
After Yu died, the tribes did not rally to Yi, the heir he had designated in life, but attached themselves to his son Qi. The Records of the Grand Historian records it as the will of the people; later skeptics read it as a carefully arranged transfer of power. Whatever the truth, "abdication" ended here: for nearly four thousand years thereafter, passing the throne to one’s son became the default rule, until 1912.
There is still no contemporary written proof that the Xia dynasty really existed; the correspondence between the flood memory of "Yu taming the waters" and the flood-deposit layers of the Yellow River valley around 1900 BC is a subject of ongoing debate in archaeology.
Below are how modern works borrow or reinterpret this name or story — not the original material. The two differ, so keep them apart.