Great Flood (China)

However, archaeological evidence of an outburst flood at Jishi Gorge on the Yellow River, comparable to similar severe events in the world in the past 10,000 years, has been dated to about 1920 BCE (a few centuries later than the traditional beginning of the Xia dynasty which came after Emperors Shun and Yao), and is suggested to have been the basis for the myth.

[3] Treated either historically or mythologically, the story of the Great Flood and the heroic attempts of the various human characters to control it and to abate the disaster is a narrative fundamental to Chinese culture.

Flood narratives in Chinese mythology share certain common features, despite being somewhat lacking in internal consistency as well as incorporating various magical transformations and divine or semi-divine interventions like Nüwa.

According to legend, a comprehensive approach to societal development resulted not only in wide-scale cooperation and large-scale efforts to control the flood but also led to the establishment of the first dynastic state of China, the Xia dynasty (c.2070–c.1600 BCE).

[14] Among these responsibilities, Shun had to deal with the Great Flood and its associated disruptions, especially in light of the fact that Yao's reluctant decision to appoint Gun to handle the problem had failed to fix the situation, despite having been working on it for the previous nine years.

Shun took steps over the next four years to reorganize the empire, in such a way as to solve immediate problems and to put the imperial authority in a better position to deal with the flood and its effects.

[17] Next, for the period of a month, Shun convoked a series of meetings, ceremonies, and interviews at the imperial capital with the Four Mountains and the heads, lords, or princes of the realm's houses, clans, surnames, tribes, and nations.

[21] Towards the end of the year, Shun returned to the imperial seat, and after a sacrificial offering of a bullock at his ancestral temple, he then put into action the plan that he had developed during his working tour of inspection.

According to the more fancily embellished versions of the story it was also necessary for him to subdue various supernatural beings as well as recruit the assistance of others, for instance a channel-digging dragon and a giant mud-hauling tortoise (or turtle).

Other versions go into the details of how a tiny remnant of people consisting of only two or a few individuals managed to survive the flood and the re-population/civilization process following the worldwide disaster, and/or how grain seeds or fire were obtained.

David Hawkes comments on the way that the various versions of the Gun-Yu story seem to contrast the relative success or failure, or at least the differences, between Gun, the father, and his son, Yu.

In this case, Gun represents a society at an earlier technological stage, which engages in small scale agriculture which involves raising areas of arable land sufficiently above the level of the marshes existing then in the flood plains of the Yellow River system, including tributaries: from this perspective the "magically-expanding" xirang soil can be understood as representing a type of floating garden, made up of soil, brushwood, and similar materials.

Yu and his work in controlling the flood would symbolize a later type of society, a one which possessed of technological innovations allowing a much larger scale approach to transforming wetlands to arable fields.

Hawkes explains the miraculous transformations of the landscape which appear in the mythological descriptions as symbolically representative of a gridded drainage system engineered to permanently eliminate entire marsh areas, in favor of agriculturally exploitable fields.

[3] The historian K. C. Wu believes that the "Canon of Yao" ("yaodian") in the Book of History (Shujing) has historical value, despite being one of the "second batch" or "new" texts comprising this collection of documents, which despite the problematic nature of their textual transmission, and that they appear to be reconstructed or heavily edited and interpolated, as compared with the "first" or "old" batch, which supposedly survived the Fires of Qin (the Burning of books and burying of scholars together with the destruction by fire of the Qin imperial library at the collapse of its dynasty).

However, the clinching factor which K. C. Wu claims is objective, extra-textual confirmation of "Yao's Canon" (and by implication, the rest of the second batch documents) has directly to do with dating the Great Flood, specifically to around the year 2200 BCE.

Each of these individuals were sent to the limits of the royal territory, one in each of the cardinal directions, where they were supposed to observe certain stars at sunset on each of the solstices and equinoxes, so the results could then be compared, and the calendar accordingly adjusted.