Yu the Great Tames the Flood

The man stopped in front of his own gate, dried mud caked up both shins, and did not go in.

He stood close enough to hear. Inside, a baby was crying, loud and hard. He listened to the whole of that crying, then turned and walked on toward the water.

It happened three times. Three times he passed his own door without going in, spread across 13 long years.

His name was Yu. Now comes the reason.

The old tellers say that in those days a great flood rose until it reached the sky. The water spread wide, wrapped around the feet of the mountains, then climbed over the hills. It swallowed the riverbanks, swallowed the paths, swallowed the places where seed was sown. The people below lived in fear, lying awake at night to the sound of water slapping against the hillsides. The ruler of that time was Emperor Yao, and he needed only one thing: someone who could tame the water.

The first man given the task was Gun, the father of Yu.

Gun's way was to block. He had his people build up, fill in, and raise thick barriers to hold the water back. The work went on for nine long years. For nine years, wherever he blocked the water, it found a way to spill over. Seal it here, and it rose over there. Fill a low spot, and it carved out another. After nine years the water still had not gone down, and the work was counted a failure.

Then Emperor Yao gave Shun charge of the affairs of the realm. Shun did something few people expected. He handed that same unfinished work to Gun's own son. The old books describe the young man as quick and hardworking, steady in character and easy to approach. When he said something, people could believe it.

The first thing Yu did was not to pick up a hoe.

He walked. He followed the mountainsides, cutting marks into tree trunks as he went. He noted where the high mountains stood and where the great rivers ran, where the water came from and where it was trying to go. He walked and watched for a long time. Then he saw something that no one had looked at closely in the nine years before. The water did not want to stay. The water only wanted to move. It was stuck.

So he did the very opposite of his father.

The father built up high to hold the water back. The son dug down deep to open a way out. Yu had the clogged rivers cleared. He had riverbeds scraped and blockages broken. He had ditches cut from the low, flooded land to the rivers, and from the rivers straight to the sea. He stopped fighting the water. He simply opened a road for it to go home.

Heard quickly, the difference between father and son sounds small, but in truth it is the whole story. One forced the water to stand still. The other asked where the water wanted to go, then cleared the way for it.

In those 13 years, Yu traveled in four different ways, depending on the ground under his feet. On dry roads he rode a cart. At deep rivers he changed to a boat. Then there were the marshes, where the mud swallowed a man to the thigh, no cart could roll and no boat could float. There he rode a kind of sled, sliding over the surface of the mud. And when he had to climb slippery cliffs, he put on shoes with spikes under the soles and pressed each step into the rock.

At his left hand were the level and the inked line. At his right were the compass and the carpenter's square. He ate plainly and lived in a low, small house, and whatever wealth he had went into the ditches and channels. Seeing him then, no one would have guessed this was the man carrying the greatest task under heaven.

And somewhere within those 13 years lay the three times he passed his gate.

The first time, he had married in the land of Tushan and set out after exactly four days. When he passed by, his newborn son, named Qi, was crying loudly inside the house. Yu stopped and listened. Then he went on.

The second time, he passed by again and stood outside the gate for a moment. Then he went on.

The third time, he passed by when the work was nearly done. This time, too, he did not step inside. But this time, what had changed was not at the gate. It was in the sound behind him.

For years, wherever he went, one sound had followed him: the dull, heavy rumble of water creeping up over the land. Standing outside his gate the third time, he no longer heard it. In its place was the sound of water running. Running steadily, running downhill, running in one direction. The water had found its way to the sea.

Nine great rivers were cleared. Nine regions were opened, nine mountains were measured, and nine marshes were given banks. Water from everywhere followed the new paths east, until it seeped out into the sea. The low land slowly rose into view, still wet and soft. Yu sent Yi to hand out rice to the people, a kind that grew in low, damp ground. He sent Hou Ji to bring food to the places still short of it. Land that had lately been the bottom of the flood soon became rice fields.

The idea behind this whole story is so simple that no one needs to teach it. After a heavy rain, when a puddle forms in a yard, there is always a child who squats down with a stick. The child scratches a small groove from the puddle to the ditch at the edge of the garden. The water follows the groove at once. The puddle shrinks and disappears. The child learned this nowhere. The child just sat and watched the water, then did what the water wanted.

Vietnamese has a word ready for that: khơi. It means to clear a way for water, and people use it for a ditch, a gutter, or a stream. The word says exactly what took Yu 13 years to finish. The only difference is that one is a stick in a child's hand, and the other is nine rivers.

This story was written down in a very old history called the Records of the Grand Historian. Sima Qian wrote it more than 2,000 years ago, and the story had been told aloud for a long time before that. Later tellers told it differently from place to place, some saying 13 years, others eight. But every version keeps the gate.

One last time, back to that spot. A man stands outside his own gate, dried mud caked up both shins, the inked line still in his hand. Inside, there is the sound of a baby. Outside, right behind him, there is the sound of water running down to the sea. He hears both sounds at once. Then he walks on.