[1] This Chinese word compounds xí 息 "breathe; cease; rest; grow; multiply" and rǎng 壤 "soil; earth".
[2] In some versions of the myths, Gun stole the xirang from the Shangdi, who sent the deity Zhu Rong to execute him in punishment, on Feather Mountain.
After begging Shangdi, he received from him a gift of as much xirang as his magical black tortoise could carry on its back, thus allowing Yu to successfully block up the 233,559 springs, the sources of the flood waters.
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.
Yu and his work in controlling the flood would symbolize a later type of society, which allowed a much larger scale approach to transforming wetlands to arable fields.