Yu the Great tamed China's floods by digging channels instead of building dams
His father spent nine fruitless years piling up dikes against the floods. Yu studied the rivers, then did the opposite: he dredged riverbeds and cut canals to lead water into fields, labouring beside ordinary workers for thirteen years. The feat made him a legendary founder of the Xia dynasty.
In Chinese tradition Yu, also called Yu the Engineer, is a sage-king remembered for the first successful state flood control, for launching dynastic rule with the Xia, and for his upright character. Confucius and other teachers praised him, and he is one of very few Chinese monarchs posthumously titled the Great. The legend is known as Great Yu Controls the Waters.
The story runs like this. Under Emperor Yao, floods repeatedly wrecked the heartland. Yu's father Gun built dikes and dams for more than nine years, even using a self-expanding soil, and failed. Yu examined the river systems to understand why, then worked with the semi-mythical farming master Hou Ji on a new approach: redirect rather than block. He is said to have eaten and slept with the labourers, and the success let early Chinese culture flourish along the rivers.
Historically the ground is shaky. Tradition places his reign in the late 3rd millennium BC, almost a thousand years before the late Shang oracle bones, China's oldest known writing. His name appears on no artefact from that era, nor on the oracle bones; it is first inscribed on Western Zhou vessels from around 1045 to 771 BC. The dictionary Shuowen Jiezi, around 121 AD, defines the character yu as bug or reptile, and linguist Axel Schuessler links it to ancient words for bee or insect.
Genealogies conflict too. Sima Qian's Shiji traces Yu through Gun back to the Yellow Emperor, while the Classic of Mountains and Seas gives a different line. His birthplace is argued between Beichuan County and Shifang in Sichuan. He grew up on the slopes of Mount Song, married Lady Tushan and had a son named Qi, meaning revelation. One excavated manuscript, provisionally dated to the Warring States period, even claims his mother conceived after eating Job's tears grains and carried him for three years.
Source: Yu the Great
