Yu the Great: The Flood-Tamer Who Never Went Home

Who Yu the Great was

Every culture that has rivers has a flood story, and most of them end with a boat. China's ends with a spade.

Yu the Great is the man who drained the world. In the version every Chinese schoolchild knows, a flood covers the land, Yu's father Gun spends nine years, by Sima Qian's count, trying to hold it back with walls of earth, fails, and is put to death. Yu takes over the job and does the reverse. He digs. He cuts channels, dredges riverbeds, and lets the water go where water wants to go, which is down and out to sea. It works.

He is called Da Yu, Great Yu, and sometimes Xia Yu, after the dynasty he is supposed to have founded. The Xia is traditionally the first of China's dynasties, and Yu's place at the head of it gives him a second job in the story, a less comfortable one. He is the ruler who handed the throne to his son. Before Yu, the tradition says, the realm went to the worthiest man. After Yu, it went to the eldest boy, for roughly four thousand years.

So the page has two stories to tell, a flood and a family, and they turn out to be the same story.

Where you still meet him today

Yu is not a figure you meet in video games. He is a figure you meet in speeches.

The single most quoted thing about him is a line from Mencius, the fourth-century BCE book of the philosopher's conversations: while he was at work on the waters, Yu passed the door of his own house three times and never went in. In Chinese that is a set phrase, and it is still the standard way to praise someone who put the public job ahead of their own family. It is meant as the highest compliment. Whether his wife saw it that way is a question the sources do not ask.

Every spring, on or near the solar term called Grain Rain, around April 20, there is a ceremony at the Mausoleum of Yu on Kuaiji Mountain outside Shaoxing, in Zhejiang. Sima Qian, the Han historian, says this is where Yu died, on a tour of inspection in the east. The rite was put on China's national list of intangible cultural heritage in 2006, and from 2007, as Xinhua's report on the ceremony puts it, it has been a state-level rite, jointly hosted by the national Ministry of Culture and the Zhejiang provincial government. That places Yu in very select company: a legendary king honored by a modern state with a formal sacrifice.

He is also in the Palace Museum in Beijing, in the heaviest possible form. In the Hall of Joyful Longevity stands a mountain of green jade 224 centimeters high and weighing, by the museum's own catalogue, 5,000 kilograms. It shows Yu's laborers cutting through cliffs to let a river out. The boulder came from Mileta Mountain near Hotan in Xinjiang. In 1781 the Qianlong Emperor's workshops drew up the design from a Song-dynasty painting of Yu in the palace collection, then shipped the stone by canal to Yangzhou, where carvers spent six years grinding it into shape; it was finished in 1787. Since jade cannot be cut, only worn away with abrasive grit (the jade hub explains why), every tree and figure on it is the product of sand and patience. It is, in other words, a monument to the flood-tamer made by the method he would have approved of: slow, collective, and relentless.

And he is in the feet of Daoist priests. Yu's labors crippled him, and the old texts are precise about the damage. The Zhuangzi says he wore the down off his calves and the hair off his shins, with the downpour for his bath and the gale for his comb. A fragment of the Shizi, a fourth-century BCE book that survives only in quotations, goes further: after ten years without looking in at home, his nails were gone, one side of his body was withered, and he walked with a limp so bad that his feet no longer passed each other, "and people called it the Pace of Yu." That hobble became a ritual. Daoist masters still perform a stepping dance based on it, tracing cosmic patterns across the floor of the altar; the scholar Poul Andersen studied it with working priests in Tainan in the 1980s and traced its theory back to Yu setting the world in order after the flood. A king's injury, turned into choreography, still danced.

Even the language keeps him. Yu, the tradition says, cast nine great bronze tripods, and "to ask the weight of the tripods" came to mean coveting the throne. The Chinese dictionary now gives the same two-word phrase, wending, a second and much happier sense: to win a championship.

Dam or drain: the father who failed

The flood story is usually told as engineering: the father built walls, the son dug ditches, the son was cleverer. The oldest version is stranger, and much darker.

In the Classic of Mountains and Seas, that bestiary of monsters and marvels compiled between the Warring States and the Han, the flood "rose to the sky." Gun does not merely build a dam. He steals something from heaven to do it: the high god's xirang, the self-growing soil, a magic earth that swells of its own accord, and he uses it "without waiting for the god's command." For that, the god sends the fire god Zhurong to kill him. And then comes the sentence that makes the whole myth: "From Gun, Yu was born." The son comes out of the punishment. The god then orders Yu to finish the job.

So the first flood-tamer is a thief and a rebel, and his son is born out of his punishment. The Book of Documents tells a tidier version in the chapter called "The Great Plan": Gun dammed the waters and threw the natural order into confusion, he was put to death, Yu rose in his place, and heaven gave Yu the Great Plan in nine divisions, the blueprint for how the world should run. The first of those nine divisions is the five phases, and the first of the five phases is water. (The later legend that the Plan came up out of the Luo River written on a turtle's back belongs to the Luoshu story, which is its own long detour.)

Strictly, Gun was not even the first to try walls. The Discourses of the States says the water god Gonggong had set out to dam the hundred rivers long before him, and was destroyed for it, and that Gun simply "carried on Gonggong's error."

China's other great flood myth goes the other way. When Nüwa repairs the broken sky, she stops the floodwater with the ash of burnt reeds. She blocks it; Yu lets it out. Taken together, the two stories stake out the two answers to a river, and the tradition clearly picked a winner.

Three times past his own door

Now the famous line, and a small scandal hiding inside it.

Mencius tells it first. He lists the rivers: Yu dredged the nine channels of the Yellow River, cleared two more into the sea, opened the Ru and the Han, drained the Huai and the Si into the Yangtze, "and only then could the central lands feed themselves." Then: "In that time Yu was away eight years, and passed his own door three times without going in."

Two centuries later, Sima Qian retells it in the Records of the Grand Historian, the first great history of China, and the numbers move. His Yu "wore out his body and burned his thoughts, lived away thirteen years, and passing the gate of his house did not dare go in." The three passes have gone. So has the brisk tone. Sima Qian gives Yu a motive Mencius never mentions: grief, and fear, because his father had failed at the same task and been executed for it. A son who has watched his father killed for an unfinished job does not stop in for dinner.

Most English retellings merge the two, so you get "thirteen years, passing his door three times," a line neither author actually wrote. Both versions are real. They are simply different books.

What everyone agrees on is that the work wrecked him, and that this was the point. Confucius, in the Analects, says of him twice in one breath, "In Yu I find no fault": he ate plain food and gave his best to the spirits, wore coarse clothes and saved his finery for the rites, lived in a humble house and spent his strength on the irrigation ditches. It is the portrait of the ideal official, and it has been on the syllabus ever since.

Nine provinces and nine tripods

When the water went down, Yu had to say what was underneath. The chapter of the Book of Documents called the "Tribute of Yu" does exactly that. It opens with Yu spreading out the land, following the mountains, cutting back the forests, and fixing the high peaks and the great rivers, and then it walks the reader through nine provinces one by one, with their soils, their rivers and the goods each should send as tribute.

It is, in effect, the first geography of China, and its framework outlived every dynasty. "The Nine Provinces" is still a literary name for the whole country, the way "Albion" is for Britain. Which tells you how the story was used: whoever wanted to describe the whole realm wrote it as Yu's survey.

Then there are the tripods. The Zuo Commentary, under the year 606 BCE, has an ambitious king of Chu march his army to the edge of the Zhou royal domain and ask, with menace, how big and heavy the royal tripods are. The Zhou envoy's answer is one of the great put-downs in Chinese literature. When the Xia still had virtue, he says, the distant regions sent pictures of their creatures and the nine governors sent metal, and the tripods were cast with those creatures on them, so that people would know the spirits from the demons. "It lies in virtue, not in the tripods." The weight of the tripods, he says, "is not yet for asking." The Zuo says only "the Xia"; by the Han, officials quoted in Sima Qian's treatise on the imperial sacrifices say flatly that Yu gathered the metal of the nine governors and cast nine tripods. The tripods were lost by the end of the Zhou. The phrase, as the living-culture section above noted, is still in the sports pages.

The man who ended rule by merit

Here is the part the textbook glosses over.

Before Yu, the tradition says, rulers chose their successors by merit: Yao passed the realm to Shun, and Shun passed it to Yu. Sima Qian sets Yu at the end of that line and in its bloodline: his Records open with the Yellow Emperor, who rose as the house of Shennong declined, and make Yu the Yellow Emperor's great-great-grandson. Yu duly named his own successor, a minister called Yi. But when Yu died, the throne went to his son Qi, and from then on it stayed in families. The Xia is the first dynasty because Yu was the first father to be succeeded by his son.

The Chinese have been arguing about how that happened for well over two thousand years, and the three surviving versions go from polite to brutal.

Mencius is asked the question directly. His student Wan Zhang puts it bluntly: people say virtue declined with Yu, because he gave the throne to his son and not to the worthiest man. Is that so? Mencius says no. "If heaven gives it to the worthy, it goes to the worthy; if heaven gives it to the son, it goes to the son." Yi, in his telling, stood aside for Qi, and the people went to Qi of their own accord, singing his praises instead of Yi's.

Sima Qian keeps the courtesy but adds a political reason. Yi had served Yu only a short time, and the world had not come round to him, "so the lords all left Yi and paid court to Qi, saying, 'Our lord is the son of Emperor Yu.'" That is not heaven choosing. That is a coalition choosing.

The Bamboo Annals do not bother with manners. These were chronicles dug out of a looted royal tomb of the old state of Wei around 280 CE, and the Book of Jin, in its biography of Shu Xi, one of the scholars who edited them, notes that they differ widely from the classics and lists the differences. One of them reads, in its entirety: "Yi usurped Qi's throne, and Qi killed him."

There is also a fourth version, and it belongs to myth rather than politics. A note by the seventh-century commentator Yan Shigu on the History of the Former Han, which he says he took from the Huainanzi (the passage is not in the text as it survives), tells how Qi was born. Yu, digging through Huanyuan Pass, turned himself into a bear to do the work, and told his wife, the woman of Tushan, to bring his food when she heard a drum. He knocked a stone onto the drum by mistake. She came, saw her husband as a bear, fled in shame, and at the foot of Mount Song turned into stone. She was pregnant. Yu shouted, "Give me my son!" and the stone split open on its north side, and out came Qi. The Han emperor Wu, touring the region in 110 BCE, recorded in an edict that he had seen "the stone of the mother of Qi."

A father executed, a son born from his corpse, a wife turned to stone by the sight of her husband at work, and a grandson born out of the stone. For a figure remembered mainly for irrigation, it is quite a family.

(Yu's courtship at Tushan has its own omen, a white fox with nine tails, which he reads on the spot as a sign he will be king. That story is told on the fox spirit page.)

Was Yu the Great real?

For most of Chinese history nobody asked. Then, in 1923, a young historian named Gu Jiegang asked very loudly.

Gu was the leader of the "Doubting Antiquity" movement, which argued that China's early history had been built up in layers, with each later age adding older and grander ancestors. He picked Yu as his test case, and his argument went through the dictionary. The Shuowen Jiezi, the first Chinese dictionary, around 100 CE, glosses the character 禹 as a creature, built on a component it explains as a beast's foot pressing the ground. A creature with feet that tread the earth, Gu concluded in print, was "probably something like a lizard," and Yu might have begun as a beast cast on the Nine Tripods and only later been promoted to a man.

The idea that the great Yu was a bug became a national joke. In 1935 Lu Xun wrote a short story about the flood, Curbing the Flood, in which a crowd of pedantic scholars sit on a hill while the water rises, and one of them insists that "Yu is a bug. Can bugs control water?" The argument Gu started, about how much of early Chinese history is history, has never stopped.

Then the evidence started to arrive. In 2002 a small, grimy bronze bowl came back to Beijing from abroad and was examined at the Poly Art Museum, which now holds it: a vessel called the Sui Gong xu. It dates to around 900 BCE, and its 98-character inscription begins, as the paleographer Li Xueqin read it, "Heaven commanded Yu to spread out the soil, to follow the mountains and dredge the rivers." That is almost word for word the language of the Tribute of Yu, on a bronze centuries older than any surviving copy of the book. The American scholar Constance Cook argues that the inscription reads like a harvest song of thanksgiving, with Yu as a founder and earth deity. So by 900 BCE Yu was not a lizard, and he was not yet quite a man either.

In 2016 a team led by the geologist Wu Qinglong published a paper in Science arguing that an earthquake around 1920 BCE brought down a landslide that dammed the Yellow River at Jishi Gorge, and that when the dam broke it produced one of the largest freshwater floods since the end of the last ice age, a plausible real event behind the Great Flood and the rise of the Xia. The paper made headlines around the world. Science then published comments from other researchers challenging the dating, the size of the lake, and the claimed link to the lower Yellow River, and the authors conceded that the connection to Yu needed more work.

So here is where things stand. The story is at least 2,900 years old, which is very old indeed. A catastrophic flood may have happened in about the right place at about the right time. No inscription from Yu's own lifetime exists, no one has found a Xia capital that says "Xia" on it, and the man himself remains unproven.

That seems fair, somehow, for a hero whose whole achievement was to make the water go away. What is left is the channel.