Yu the Great

Chinese tradition remembers a great flood in the age of the sage kings Yao and Shun, waters so vast they were said to reach the sky and drown the hills. Yao first charged Gun, Yu's father, with controlling it, and Gun tried for nine years using dikes and dams to wall the water back, a method that failed completely and, in the version recorded by the historian Sima Qian, ended with Gun executed or exiled for the failure. Shun then charged Gun's son Yu with the same task.

Yu changed the method entirely. Rather than containing the water, he surveyed the land, cut new channels through mountains, and dredged the riverbeds so the floodwaters could drain to the sea on their own course, a strategy of working with the water's movement instead of opposing it outright. The labor is remembered as taking thirteen years, during which Yu is said to have passed by the gate of his own house three times without going in, once even as he heard his newborn son crying inside, so total was his devotion to finishing the work before turning to his own family.

The flood story is also a founding myth for Chinese geography and administration in the tradition's own telling: as Yu channeled the waters he is credited with surveying and dividing the land into the nine provinces of ancient China, described in the Tribute of Yu chapter of the Book of Documents, so that taming the flood and organizing the realm become a single continuous act of world ordering rather than two separate achievements.

Yu's reward for taming the flood was the throne itself. Chinese tradition remembers the age before him as governed by abdication, in which a ruler, nearing the end of his reign, passed power not to his own son but to whichever man in the realm had proven most capable and virtuous. Yao had passed the throne to Shun this way rather than to his own less able son, and Shun, recognizing Yu's achievement in ending the flood, passed it to Yu in turn.

Yu, according to Sima Qian's Records of the Grand Historian, initially observed the same custom, naming a minister named Yi as his intended successor and withdrawing from public life to let Yi take the position at the proper time, in the pattern Yao and Shun had set. But when Yu died, the lords of the realm are said to have gone instead to Yu's own son Qi, judging him the abler man, and Qi accepted the throne, breaking the abdication custom and establishing hereditary succession within Yu's own family. This is traditionally counted as the founding of the Xia dynasty, held to be the first dynasty of Chinese history, though its existence is not directly confirmed by archaeology in the way the following Shang dynasty is, and its opening reigns are treated by most modern historians as legendary or only partly historical.

The transition is remembered in later Chinese political thought as the hinge between the idealized age of virtuous abdication and the long history of dynastic, hereditary rule that followed it, with Confucian writers often looking back to Yao, Shun, and Yu as the model of rule by merit even as they accepted that Yu's own dynasty was the one that ended it.