Gun

Gun appears in Chinese tradition as the father of Yu the Great and as the flood-controller who failed where his son succeeded. He is a legendary figure: the stories about him are preserved in texts of the Eastern Zhou and Han periods — the Book of Documents, the Mencius, the Classic of Mountains and Seas, and Sima Qian's Records of the Grand Historian among them — composed long after the remote era, conventionally the late third millennium BC, in which the tradition places him. No contemporary evidence for his existence is possible, and a reference work can only recount what the tradition says.

In the received narrative, the world in the time of the sage-king Yao was overwhelmed by a great flood. On the recommendation of the assembled lords, and despite Yao's recorded misgivings about his character, Gun was appointed to subdue the waters. He labored for nine years, building dikes and embankments to dam and wall off the flood, and failed; the waters broke through and the devastation continued. For this failure — in some versions compounded by the theft from Heaven of xirang, a miraculous "swelling earth" that grew of itself, used without divine sanction — he was condemned by Shun, Yao's successor, and executed or exiled at Feather Mountain (Yushan). Mythological elaborations relate that his body lay unrotted for three years until it was cut open and Yu emerged from it, or that his spirit transformed into a yellow bear or other creature; the more sober historiographical tradition simply records his disgrace and death.

The structure of the legend is plainly didactic: Gun's obstruction of the waters by force contrasts with the patient channeling by which his son Yu mastered the flood, won the throne by merit, and became in tradition the founder of the Xia dynasty. Father and son thus form a paired lesson about wrong and right method, and about failure redeemed in the next generation, since Yu's son Qi went on to establish hereditary succession.

The Xia dynasty itself remains archaeologically unconfirmed; some scholars connect it with the Erlitou culture, others regard the question as open. Gun, standing a generation earlier still, belongs entirely to the realm of myth and moral exemplum rather than recoverable history.