Yu the Great was a legendary 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 precede 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 supposed era of Yu, nor the later oracle bones, make any mention of Yu; he does not appear in inscription until vessels dating to the Western Zhou period (c. 1045–771 B.C.). [Source: Wikipedia +]

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. +

Dr. Robert Eno of Indiana University wrote: Yu was “a semi-divine figure, part man and part beast, who tamed the flood by dredging the river beds of mud. This Yu of myth came to be identified with the founder of what was traditionally known as China’s earliest dynastic ruling line: the Xia Dynasty – Yu the man-beast became Emperor Yu. In “The Canon of Shun” we see him rewarded for his flood-taming skills by being promoted to Minister of Works under the Emperor Shun. [Source: Robert Eno, Indiana University/+/ ]