Volume IV
Floods and the Nine Provinces
From Flood Control to the Threshold of the Early Dynasties
Preface
The flood of the Yao–Shun age poses a new problem. Heaven and earth are ordered, humanity lives within them, and sage rulers have defined moral government, yet water and landscape can still overturn everything.
This volume begins with flood memory and Gun’s failure, follows Yu’s labor and the spatial order of the Nine Provinces, then reaches the threshold of Xia through Lady Tushan, Qi and disputed succession.
Received texts, bronze inscriptions, environmental archaeology, hydraulic sites and early-state archaeology answer different questions. They can be compared, but they do not combine automatically into one biography of Yu.
The central task is not to use one site to prove an entire legend, but to understand how flood, engineering, geography and kingship became connected in cultural memory.