It seems to be quite plausible that events of prehistory as old as the accounts of the Yellow Emperor, Yao and Shun, Yu the Great and the Xia Dynasty are purely mythical inventions. Gu Jiegang 顧頡剛 and Qian Xuantong 錢玄同, representants of the School Doubting Antiquity (Yigupai 疑古派) demonstrated that the Xia Dynasty was a pure invention of later periods. But as not much more is known of the Xia Dynasty as simple genealogical lists of the rulers, there should be no doubt about the existence of such a royal line, even if detailed accounts of Yu taming the floods and fixing the geography of China might be of later date. Traditional accounts According to traditional historical sources, the Xia Dynasty was founded by Yu the Great (Da Yu) 大禹 (surname: Si 姒), enfeoffed as Viscount of Xia 夏伯 by the mythical emperor Shun 舜. He - like is father Gun 鯀 - is credited with the taming of the floods that inundanted the Central Plain 中原. During his work, Yu the Great divided "China" into nine provinces with each region having its particular rivers and mountains, and he categorized the soil of these regions into nine classes. The report about this "Tribute of Yu" (Yu gong 禹貢) was surely compiled at least at the end of the Zhou period 周. Yu, Bo Yi (Boyi) 伯夷 and Gao Tao (Gaotao) 皋陶 served as the highest councilors of Emperor Shun. When Shun died, Yu refused to succede to the imperial throne in favor of Shun's son Shang Jun (Shangjun) 商均. But the nobles all wanted to serve Yu as the new emperor. Yu the Great is connected with the area of Guiji 會稽 in modern Zhejiang where tourists can still find his tomb. Yu's son Jing 啟 was the first ruler in China who directly succeeded to his father. Before, all emperors had not chosen their own sons as successors, but a noble and worthy man. Under king (emperor) Tai Kang (Taikang) 太康 a rebellion of the king's five brothers (Wu Zi 五子) endangered the untiy of the kingdom. His brother and successor Zhong Di (Zhongdi) 中康 was unable to control his ministers Xi 羲 and He 和 who engaged in lust and selfishness. During this years, the Lord of Yin 胤 attacked the two potentates. After several generations, King Kong Jia (Kong Jia) 孔甲 again endangered the royal line. The last ruler of Xia was Jie 桀, known as a cruel and depraved tyrant. Mo Xi (Moxi) 末喜 (Mei Xi [Meixi]) 妹喜 The lords of the various domains rebelled against Jie, their head being Tang the Perfect (Cheng Tang 成湯) who was incarcerated and later freed by Jie. Tang assembled an army and dethroned Jie who died in exile in Nanchao 南巢 somewhere in the south. His descendants were enfeoffed with the small fief of Qi 杞. Archeological evidence While the traditional accounts about the Xia Dynasty were long dispised as pure mythical accounts, the discovering of the Anyang oracle bones and the verification of the traditional ruler lists of the Shang Dynasty make it possible that at least the ruler lists given in histories like the Shiji 史記 and the Bamboo Annals are partially true. Archeology in the last decades has shown that the city of Yin as capital of Shang (13th to 11th cent. BC) was by no means a capital of a vast kingdom but rather one single city state that controlled other states and areas in a distance of several hundred miles. It might have been pure incidence that the Zhou historiographers chose the royal dynasty of Yin as universal predecessor of their own dynasty. Similarly, a further royal line called Xia was seen as a universal dynasty controlling the Central Yellow River Plain before the takeover by the Shang. In the 15th to 14th centuries the situation seemed to be quite different. The mighty city state discovered in Erligang 二里岡 (modern Zhengzhou 鄭州/Henan) controlled regions far south as Hubei and Jiangxi. Not far away, archeologists discovered a neolithic and early bronze age site near Erlitou 二里頭 (near Luoyang 洛陽/Henan) that might well have been the domain of a royal house like that of Xia. Recently, pottery with inscribed readable Chinese characters have been discovered there. The state of Erlitou was not only a cultural center whose inhabitants made use of a script, but archeological remains that are linked with Erlitou are dispersed in a large area of southern Shanxi and northern Henan. Erlitou might have been the mightiest state of that period, and probably later historians chose this state as predecessor of the later Shang Dynasty - that was likewise no single state but one of the most powerful of her time.

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