The Great Yu of Xia

Whenever the river broke its banks and flooded the surrounding land, scholar officials of the past would voice their dismay that the channeling method of Sage Yu was not followed. It must have been tried innumerable number of times, but accomplished nothing for it simply would not work. The Yellow River is so heavily laden with sediment, not even modern technology can succeed in clearing the channel. Over one billion tonnes of sediment flows down the river annually; no amount of dredging can remotely define a course to channel its flow.

Throughout history all efforts in managing the Yellow River relied on levee construction to prevent overtopping of the dykes, and not on dredging. Nowadays no hydraulic experts would believe that Yu had accomplished the much acclaimed channel-clearing feast. What then was the actual accomplishment of Yu in river management judging from the modern perspective?

We shall use the following time frame for the correlation of events. Yu (or his son) founded the Xia empire (c. 2200 - 1750 BC), which was followed by Shang (c. 1750 - 1100 BC), and then by Zhou (c. 1100 - 250 BC). Though no written records earlier than 1400 BC are known to us, a large number of texts written in the middle of the first millennium BC recorded many historical events from the second millennium BC. They could be based on written records lost to us, such as those written on bamboo tablets and silk fabrics, or on orally transmitted legends. All of these will be considered legends to us.

After the discovery of the oracle bones at the Ruins of Yin near Anyang, Henan, whose inscriptions register many details about official functions in the Shang royal household, we find they are in basic agreement with those chronicled in early writings. We are thus led to believe that much of the chronology attributed to Xia in early writings may also be useful [1].

At the time of Yu, the Yellow River behaved more or less the same as it is now. Flowing pass the loess plateau along its course between Shanxi and Shaanxi, it picked up over a billion tonnes of sediment and deposited it onto the delta after it emerged from the mountainous constriction near the present city of Mengjin in Henan province. The Yellow River delta was being built up rapidly. Reconstructed maps of the time show that the delta occupied much less land than the modern North China plain.

The earliest known course of the Yellow River across the delta dates back to the time of Yu, and is called the Yu Huang Gu Dao (King Yu's Course). It flowed northerly, following a fault line running parallel to the Taihangshan mountain range. Before the river adopted this course, it exited to sea south of the Taishan mountain through the present-day Huai River valley. With the river directed northward along the Yu Huang Gu Dao, the river delta north of the Taishan mountain began to expand toward the Bohai sea. [A detailed illustration of the Yellow River's floodplain is shown here on a 100K file.]

In a recent article [2], its author suggests that a major earthquake occurred at the time of Yu. The land ruptured along the fault line to give rise to the Yu Huang Gu Dao. The author interprets a passage in the ancient text Huai Nan Zi (c. 200 BC), which translates roughly as follows: "when Gong Gong and Xhuan Xu competed for leadership, the mountain at Bu Zhou was disrupted, causing the sky-supporting column to buckle, and land mass to rupture," to refer to this catastrophic upheaval of the terrain at the time of Xhuan Xu, two generations before Yu.

I tend to believe that a natural cause of this magnitude was most likely to have occurred, since it created a channel so deep as to divert the Yellow River's flow northward for over a millennium.

As a child we all learned that Yu was rewarded by King Shun for his river taming effort, and Yu was appointed by Shun to succeed him in ruling the empire, while Shun himself was handpicked by his predecessor King Yao for succession. All that harmonious succession business was definitely non-historical. It gave the appearance that the Yellow River valley was already unified into an empire under a single leadership, a highly unrealistic state of affair indeed. Such stories were invented by people one and a half millennia later to enshrine Yao, Shun, and Yu as role models for future rulers. History was unfortunately corrupted by the desire of some grand masters to use antiquity to mirror the present. Antiquity was polished to bring out the shine. We must ignore this piece of exegerated achievement in the Chinese civilization.

According to the general history of China [3], Yao's group was situated in the west along the Fen River valley in Shanxi, Shun's group in the east along the peripheral of the Taishan mountain, and Yu's group in the middle, at the foot of the Songshan mountain (of the modern-day Shaoling Temple fame) in Henan province. These locations are based on subsequent identification of geographical names used in the legends. A look at the map will convince us that they all occupied highlands next to mountains. This suggests that the river delta at the time was not suitable for permanent human habitation due to its random flooding. Also, Yao and Shun were separated by such distance that they could hardly have anything to do with each other.

Based on meager evidence and with much reservation, I now offer the following interpretation to the river-taming legends of Yu. After the Yellow River adopted its course along the Yu Huang Gu Dao, it ceased to threaten its former southern course, or the present-day Huai River valley, with floods. The region became prosperous. Many of Huai's tributaries once choked by sediments left behind by the Yellow River must be cleared to be serviceable. It is possible that Yu participated in the clearing of the Huai River's tributaries, for which he was remembered as a great hydraulic engineer.

We must realize that the Yellow River is unmanageable even with modern technology. Situated downstream of a huge watershed, its flow was immense, and we should not expect Yu to challenge it effectively. On the other hand the Huai River system was suitable for micro-management, so that every effort put in could yield immediate benefit. The tributaries of the Huai River system fanned out like a web. There must be numerous catchment basins which were small enough for people of the time to manage successfully.

Great opportunities opened up for the Huai River valley after the Yellow River took its northern course. We now find archaeological sites of the Longshan culture, which is the period related to the pre-Xia dynasty founded by Yu, to spread across the Huai River valley as a result of Yellow River's departure from the region.

With Huai River valley opened up for habitation, Yu's group led by his father Gun started to expand eastward towards the Shandong pennisular which was the stronghold of Shun. Gun was killed by Shun, as told in legends. If we ignore all subsequent moral embellishments, I think Gun was killed simply because he was defeated by Shun.

Eventually Yu defeated Shun to take over the entire eastern region. Possibly, Shun "surrendered," and was spared of execution, which was later glorified as "harmonious succession." If my interpretation of the legends is correct, such an act would signal the emergence of an early slave society, in which the vanquished was put to productive use (instead of being wasted in summary execution). To achieve this level of civilization, the leadership of the conquering group must be actively managing production (instead of imposing forced "taxation" on the subjects as warrior bands would do). Yu's alleged river-management activities certainly suggest that his administration had reached such a level of development.

Legends also describe that Yu went south to the present-day Yangtze River valley to look into the region's water resource potential. Yu was either hooked by tourism, or that he and his band were marauding down south to expand their sphere of raiding, as the south was emerging into prosperity. After a 13-year odyssey, Yu returned north to consolidate his authority as the ruler of the Xia empire. He had to establish hegemony among thousands of competing tribes, and to bring them under submission. It was not an easy task indeed, but he probably found life even more stressful mingling among the southern barbarians. Little did he know that a new organized society was emerging from the fertile Huai River valley, blossomed eventually into the Shang empire, which later challenged Yu's Xia empire, and toppled it 500 years later.

Now that the Yellow River had taken a more or less stable course along the Yu Huang Gu Dao, the former river delta in the north became habitable. Yu moved north to settle on the east bank of the river in the present northern Henan, close to Hebei. With superior resources derivable from the fertile North China plain, while it was free of floods, Yu might have advanced westward along the Yellow River to the Fen River valley in Shanxi to take over Yao's stronghold. These events were later transformed into legends of Yu's conquest of the Yellow River at Longmen. Along the way, or at a much earlier time, he could have taken out Gong Gong from his base at the Luo River valley, who was always a thorn by his side.

With the Yellow River flowing in such a northerly direction, ice jam at its mouth would be unavoidable, causing spring floods, which would provide a form of natural irrigation, beneficial to farming, in areas belonging to the present-day Hebei plain. Numerous minor states emerged there. Yu's descendants sought help from these states whenever palace coups occurred within the Xia empire. Such stories were told in Sima Qian's Shiji, ("Records of the Historian", c. 100 BC).

A few hundred years into the Xia dynasty, the Yu Huang Gu Dao became silted, and floods again threatened the North China plain, and weakened the economic base of the Xia empire. While the empire was struggling with internal conflicts, the emerging Shang slowly edged northward to take over most of the Huai River valley east and south of the Xia empire. Unified under a single leadership Shang overthrew the Xia empire to form the Shang empire. During the final years of the Xia dynasty (c. 1700 BC), its royal household was moved to the highlands in the Luo River valley (at the Erlitou archaeological site) testifying to its retreat from the northern Yellow River delta, which once nourished the Xia empire at its prime.

With its favorable agricultural potential, the Huai River valley could, in principle, establish itself as a power center in the struggle for supremacy on the North China plain, but this never occurred after Shang, because subsequent course changes of the Yellow River would damage it repeatedly with floods.

Archaeological evidences reveal that the capital of the early Shang dynasty was located at the modern city Zhengzhou, which is a vulnerable spot for Yellow River flood in recent times, but apparently not so 3500 years ago, after the Yellow River was diverted northwards. It would be quite difficult to understand why the Shang dynasty eventually abandoned the Huai River valley, if not for the return of the Yellow River's floods onto the plain.

The last capital of Shang, before it was overthrown by Zhou, was located at Anyang in a narrow strip of land between the Taihangshan mountain range and the Yu Huang Gu Dao. Apparently, the entire North China plain became once again the Yellow River delta. Both of the river's northern course, the Hai River valley, and its southern course, the Huai River valley, were being ravaged by floods again. The Shang empire had to retreat to the highlands bordering the Taihangshan mountain range. Trapped in such a narrow strip of land, Shang could not muster enough resources to resist the invading army of Zhou, and fell (c. 1050 BC).

By the time of the Autumn and Fall period (c. 722 - 481 BC), when the Xia legends were transcribed into written texts, a millennium had elapsed. By then the Yu Huang Gu Dao became silted, and the Yellow River had adopted a new course, the Xi Han Gu Dao (Course at Western Han Dynasty, 602 BC - AD 11), and was behaving very differently. It is understandable why the historians of the time (and the transmitters of the legends before them) could not relate to the geographical and resource-related issues inherent in the legends of Yu, which are being emphasized here. The consistency of the events was restructured according to a universal moral code, which was the only way to make sense of them. For example, turning Yu's father Gun into an evil person was one such twist to justify his execution by Shun who was enshrined as a Sage King. The fall of Xia, as well as the fall of Shang, were blamed on despotic rulers succumbing to the temptation of beautiful women, and not because of changing fortunes due to the shifting of Yellow River.

Here we try to interpret the rise and fall of the dynasties by the pattern of the Yellow River delta, which governed the natural resources of the region, and which should have profound effects on the states occupying them. Also, if we do not indulge in the believe that the political climate of the time was so idealistically harmonious, and that warfare was a way of life, then the so-called "slave society" was actually a progressive political institution, one that turned plundering warrior bands into productive laborers, and their weapons into bronze vessels! Am I suppose to be a revisionist on this score?

References

Author's apology: The readers must be reminded that the author is not a student of either history or archaeology. Some of the historical or archaeological details used here may be in error. The article is meant to be stimulating instead of doctrinaire. It is included here to add a lighter side to this web site. Please accept the author's apology for taking a pedestrian's approach to such a long cherished subject.