Yu the Great

The water stood over the plain for a generation. It was not the sudden flood of one bad season but a standing world of water, and the people who survived it lived above it, in nests lashed into the branches of trees on the low ground and in burrows scraped out of the hillsides higher up. Everything smelled of silt. Grain would not grow, the dead could not be buried, and the beasts moved into the empty fields.

The first man sent against it was Gun, and Gun tried to build. He went to the Lord on High and stole xirang, the swelling soil, a living earth that grew of its own accord, and he heaped it into dams and levees against the water. For nine years he did this. The water found its way around every wall he raised, because water always does. The Lord on High, robbed and unimpressed, sent the fire god Zhurong to Feather Mountain, and Gun was killed there. What happened next is the part the early poets could not stop asking about. His body did not rot. After three years it was cut open, and out of his belly came his son.

Yu inherited the job and abandoned the method. Instead of walling the water out he opened the ground and let it leave, cutting through hills, straightening beds, joining channels until the rivers ran to the sea. The work took thirteen years. Accounts from the older strata give him help that is frankly supernatural, a winged dragon travelling ahead of him and dragging its tail across the land to score the line each new channel should follow, and a black turtle carrying the swelling soil behind. They also give him something plainer. He carried a plough and a spade himself and went first, and by the end, according to Han Fei, there was no down left on his thighs and no hair on his shins.

There is a scene the sources return to again and again. Yu is upstream on some nameless cutting, standing to the knee in cold brown water, hands on the shaft of a wooden lei, and the track past him leads within sight of his own gate. He hears his household inside. He does not go in. Three times over those years he passed his own door and three times he kept walking, and the classics record this without comment, as if it were simply the price.

What he actually looked like, nobody wrote down. The tradition is oddly incurious about his face and specific about his damage. By the end of the work he is described as half paralysed, one side of the body no longer answering, so that he moved with a hitching, dragging gait, one foot always trailing. That walk outlived him by thousands of years. Daoist ritual took it up as the Yubu, the Pace of Yu, a shuffling dance step used to tread out the pattern of the Big Dipper and to force a way into places living people are not meant to go. A priest in a Song-dynasty temple limping across a ritual floor was borrowing the injuries of a man who had dug too long.

His marriage went the way the work did. On Mount Huanyuan he needed to cut a passage, so he turned himself into a bear and dug, and he told the woman of Tushan that when she heard a drum she should bring him food. Working, he threw up a stone that struck the drum. She came, and found a bear tearing at the mountainside. She ran. At the foot of Mount Song she stopped and became stone. Yu came after her and stood in front of the rock and said, give me back my son. The stone split open along its north face and Qi was born out of it, and his name means to open.

Not all of the flood was water. Xiangliu, the nine-headed serpent minister of the water god Gonggong, grazed from nine mountains at once with its nine heads and fouled everything it touched, and where it belched or bled the ground turned bitter and marshy and no grain would take root. Yu killed it. Then he had to deal with the corpse, which poisoned the soil three times over, until he dug out the tainted earth and heaped it into a terrace for the gods, north of Kunlun, where nothing but a strange bitter tree would grow.

With the water gone there was land, and land had to be described. Yu walked the drained world and split it into nine provinces, and set what each owed in tribute according to the quality of its soil, and this survey became a chapter of the Book of Documents that reads less like myth than like a tax assessment. From the metal the nine regions sent him he cast nine great bronze cauldrons, and on them he had the creatures of every region figured, so that a traveller could look at the images and know which spirits meant him harm. The cauldrons became the physical proof of the right to rule. Centuries later, when an ambitious lord wanted to test whether the reigning dynasty could still be challenged, he asked politely about the size and weight of the cauldrons, and everyone present understood exactly what he had said.

Yu’s powers are all versions of the same power, which is the ability to change the shape of the world by attacking it. He opens mountains, redirects rivers, kills the thing in the water, and turns himself into an animal when an animal’s strength is what the rock requires. His limits are the same thing seen from the other side. Every one of those victories is paid for out of his own body, and the body runs out. He loses his wife to the sight of what the work turned him into. And his last defeat is the quietest. He named Yi, his long-serving minister, as heir, in the old way, by merit. When Yu died at Mount Kuaiji the lords went past Yi and gave their allegiance to Qi, the son born from the stone, and the throne became hereditary, and the age of chosen successors ended with the man who had drained the world.

No archaeology has ever found him. What exists is a bronze grain vessel, the Bin Gong xu, made around the ninth century BCE and recovered from the Hong Kong antiquities market in 2002, whose ninety-eight characters open with Heaven commanding Yu to spread out the land, cut the hills and clear the rivers. That inscription is the earliest surviving text about him by several centuries, and it proves the story was circulating in the Western Zhou, which is not the same as proving the man. A 2016 paper argued that a real outburst flood from a landslide dam in the Jishi Gorge around 1920 BCE lay behind the legend and vindicated the Xia; published responses in the same journal disputed the dating, the flood’s reach and the reading of the texts. Worth noting on its own terms: in the oldest accounts Yu is not fighting the Yellow River at all. He is opening every riverbed in the world, and his flood and the founding of the Xia are two separate stories that only later got sewn together.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who was Yu the Great?

Yu the Great was the sage-king of Chinese mythology who ended a catastrophic world flood and became the founding ruler of the Xia dynasty. He is the son of Gun, who failed at the same task before him. His flood work is described in the Book of Documents, the Classic of Mountains and Seas and Sima Qian’s Records of the Grand Historian.

How did Yu the Great stop the flood?

He dredged instead of damming. Where his father Gun had tried to wall the water out with stolen self-growing soil called xirang, Yu cut channels through hills and opened riverbeds so the water could drain to the sea, a labour said to have taken thirteen years. Some accounts credit him with a winged dragon that scored the ground ahead of him to mark where the channels should run.

Why does Yu the Great walk with a limp?

The tradition says his years of labour left him half paralysed, with one side of his body dragging. Daoist ritual later adopted that hitching gait as the Yubu, or Pace of Yu, a dance step used to tread out the stars of the Big Dipper and to compel spirits. It is one of the oldest continuously used ritual movements in Chinese religion.

What are the Nine Tripod Cauldrons?

They are nine bronze vessels Yu is said to have cast from metal sent by the nine provinces he surveyed, each figured with the creatures of its region so travellers could recognise dangerous spirits. Possession of the cauldrons came to stand for the legitimate right to rule. Asking about their weight became a formal way of announcing that you intended to take the throne.

Is there any evidence Yu the Great was a real person?

No archaeological find identifies him directly. The earliest surviving mention is the Bin Gong xu, a bronze vessel from around the ninth century BCE whose inscription describes Heaven ordering Yu to spread out the land and clear the rivers, which shows the legend already existed in the Western Zhou period. A 2016 study linked the myth to a real outburst flood around 1920 BCE, but other researchers publicly disputed its dating and conclusions.

Related Entries

Gong Gong, Zhurong, Nüwa, Fuxi, Shennong, Huang-ti, Pangu, Longma, Dragon turtle, Taotie, Hundun, Qiongqi, Lóng