There are no contemporaneous records of the Xia, and they are not mentioned in the oldest Chinese texts, the earliest oracle bone inscriptions dating from the Late Shang period (13th century BC).

The earliest mentions occur in the oldest chapters of the Book of Documents, which report speeches from the early Western Zhou period and are accepted by most scholars as dating from that time.

The Xia dynasty was described in several Chinese classics, including the Book of Documents, the Bamboo Annals, and Sima Qian's Shiji.

According to Sima Qian and other early texts, Gun, the father of Yu the Great, is the earliest recorded member of the Xia clan.

[5] According to traditional accounts, Shun trusted Yu and appointed him to stop the flooding, which he did by organizing people from different tribes and ordered them to help him dig channels in all the major rivers and lead the water out to the sea.

The Bamboo Annals describe the Xia capital at Zhenxun being attacked by Hou Yi while Tai Kang was on a hunt beyond the Luo River.

In the eighth year of the reign of Tai Kang's nephew Xiang, Hou Yi was killed by his former chief minister Han Zhuo.

Xiang's son Shao Kang was sheltered by a tribal chief, surviving for years as a fugitive despite the efforts of Han Zhuo to eliminate him and prevent any reemergence of the Xia.

[10] Jie is recorded as the final King of Xia, and as with many last rulers in Chinese historiography, he was said to be immoral, lascivious, and tyrannical.

These are Ji (冀), Yan (兗), Qing (青), Xu (徐), Yang (揚), Jing (荊), Yu (豫), Liang (梁) and Yong (雍).

According to the chapter "Tribute of Yu" in the text, the Nine Provinces respectively correspond to modern regions of China as:[13] The Xia dynasty moved the capital many times.

According to the "Tribute of Yu" chapter of the Book of Documents, the scope of direct jurisdiction of the Xia state was limited to a small area controlled by the ruling clan.

The Book of the Later Han quotes Huangfu Mi's work Diwang Shiji, which claims that when Yu the Great finished establishing the Nine Provinces, the total population was 13,553,923 individuals;[26] however, this number is highly speculative because Huangfu Mi reached his conclusion by extrapolating from demographic statuses of the Qin, Han, Jin dynasties.

Records have it that when Tai Kang established Lun as his capital, the settlement had about one lu, which was 500 people according to Du Yu, and this number includes only soldiers.

Modifying the figures and adding other types of people, Song Zhenhao postulated that this supposed city had between 1500 and 2500 individuals by the time of Tai Kang,[27] a number he classified as medium.

Wang Yumin, using description of demography during the reign of Emperor Shun who directly preceded the Xia, concluded that the population of the dynasty was around 2.1 million.

The Doubting Antiquity School led by Gu Jiegang in the 1920s were the first scholars within China to systematically question the traditional story of its early history.

[30] The existence of the Xia remains unproven, despite efforts by Chinese archaeologists to link them with the Bronze Age Erlitou culture.

"[32] In The Shape of the Turtle: Myth, Art, and Cosmos in Early China, Sarah Allan noted that many aspects of the Xia are simply the opposite of traits held to be emblematic of the Shang.

[44] The project assigned all four phases of Erlitou to the Xia, and identified the transition to the Shang with the construction of walled cities at Yanshi and Zhengzhou around 1600 BC.

[49] The only musical instruments found at Erlitou are a qing sounding stone, two small clapper bells (one earthenware, one bronze) and a xun with one finger hole.

[50][51] Due to this extreme scarcity of surviving instruments and the general uncertainty surrounding most of the Xia, creating a musical narrative of the period is impractical.

[52] Archaeological evidence of a large outburst flood at Jishi Gorge that destroyed the Lajia site on the upper reaches of the Yellow River has been dated to c. 1920 BC.

The Cambridge History of Ancient China adopted this standpoint with the promise of providing a commonly accepted synthesis based on an exhaustive discussion of the latest pre-Qin material available at the end of the 1990s.

This is of extraordinary significance, because if this book aims to provide a commonly accepted synthesis, then the blood, sweat, and tears of Chinese scholars over the past decade that brought about countless achievements in Xia period research will become a joke, and many Chinese scholars in the field will lose all sense of direction and not know how to get back on the right track.

[55]However, as Chen Chun and Gong Xin point out, the debate upon the Xia dynasty's historical existence stems from different research orientations between Chinese and Western scholars.

They claim that mainland Chinese scholars focused mainly on extrapolations of excavated evidence to establish a historical perspective, and overlooked other complex factors in ancient human activities.

This method, according to the two authors, resulted in high levels of subjectivity and contradicted the common trend among Western researchers, which took the physical discoveries as not necessarily representing real social or political units.