Yu the Great
| Yu the Great | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Yu the Great, Color on silk at the National Palace Museum
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| Chinese | 大禹 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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| Transcriptions | |
|---|---|
| Standard Mandarin | |
| Hanyu Pinyin | Dà Yǔ |
| Gwoyeu Romatzyh | Dah Yeu |
| Wade–Giles | Ta4 Yü3 |
| IPA | [tâ ỳ] |
| Yue: Cantonese | |
| Yale Romanization | Daaih Yúh |
| Jyutping | Daai6 Jyu5 |
| Southern Min | |
| Hokkien POJ | Daí Wu |
| Old Chinese | |
| Baxter-Sagart | *lˤa[t]-s [ɢ]ʷ(r)aʔ |
Yu the Great (Chinese: 大禹; pinyin: Dà Yǔ, c. 2200 – 2101 BC) was a mythological ruler in ancient China famed for his introduction of flood control, inaugurating dynastic rule in China by founding the Xia Dynasty, and for his upright moral character.
The dates proposed for Yu's reign predate the oldest known written records in China, the oracle bones of the late Shang dynasty, by nearly a millennium. No inscriptions on artifacts from the proposed era of Yu, nor the later oracle bones, make any mention of Yu; he does not appear in inscriptions until vessels dating to the Western Zhou period (c. 1045–771 BC). The lack of anything remotely close to contemporary documentary evidence has led to some controversy over the historicity of Yu. Proponents of the historicity of Yu theorise that stories about his life and reign were transmitted orally in various areas of China until they were recorded in the Zhou dynasty, while opponents believe the figure existed in legend in a different form - as a god or mythical animal - in the Xia dynasty, and morphed into a human figure by the start of the Zhou dynasty. Many of the stories about Yu were collected in Sima Qian's famous Records of the Grand Historian. Yu and other "sage-kings" of Ancient China were lauded for their virtues and morals by Confucius and other Chinese teachers.
Yu is one of the few Chinese rulers posthumously honored with the epithet "the Great".
According to several ancient Chinese records, Yu was the 8th great-grandson of the Yellow Emperor: Yu's father, Gun, was the 5th great-grandson of Emperor Zhuanxu; Zhuanxu's father, Changyi, was the second son of the Yellow Emperor. Yu was said to have been born at Mount Wen (汶山), in modern-day Beichuan County, Sichuan Province, though there are debates as to whether he was born in Shifang instead. Yu's mother was of the Youxin clan named either Nüzhi (女志) or Nüxi (女嬉).
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