Qi

Tradition assigns to Qi of Xia the moment at which Chinese kingship became hereditary. He appears in the legends as the son of Yu the Great, the flood-tamer who founded the Xia dynasty, and his accession is presented as the end of the idealized age in which sage-kings passed the throne to the worthiest man rather than to their own sons. Like his father and grandfather Gun, Qi is a figure of tradition, not of verifiable history: the accounts of him come from texts of the Eastern Zhou and Han periods, written perhaps fifteen centuries or more after his conventional date around 2000 BC, and they should be read as a reference work reads the legends of early Rome.

Even his birth is mythological in the sources: one well-known story relates that his mother, the Tushan girl, turned to stone when she saw Yu in the form of a bear, and that the stone split open to deliver the child — Qi's name means "opening." The politically significant tradition concerns the succession. Yu, following the precedent of Yao and Shun, is said to have designated his minister Boyi (Yi) as successor; but on Yu's death the lords and people turned to Qi, whether spontaneously, as the Mencius has it, because Qi was worthy and the people remembered his father, or because, in harsher versions, Qi seized the position and killed Yi. With his accession the principle of abdication to the worthiest ended, and rule by a single family line began — for later Chinese thinkers, the watershed between the age of "all under Heaven as public" and dynastic possession of the state.

The tradition adds that Qi's authority was contested: the lord of Hu refused allegiance, and Qi defeated him at the battle of Gan, before which the "Speech at Gan" preserved in the Book of Documents is purportedly delivered. His reign is otherwise thinly described, and after his death his sons quarreled, leading to the troubled reign of his successor Taikang.

No archaeological evidence attests Qi or the dynastic transition he represents. Scholars who link the Xia with the Erlitou culture treat the succession narrative, at most, as a schematized memory of early state formation; others regard the entire Xia king list as retrospective construction. Within the tradition, however, Qi's accession remained the canonical origin of hereditary monarchy in China.