Xia Dynasty

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The Xia is the first of the dynasties listed in the traditional account of Chinese history, said to have ruled the central plains of the Yellow River before the Shang. The later histories — above all Sima Qian’s Records of the Grand Historian, compiled around the first century BCE — give it a founder, a line of kings, and a span of several centuries placed roughly in the early second millennium BCE. What those histories report and what can be independently established are not the same thing, and the gap between them is the central problem of the Xia.

The dynasty’s defining story is a story about water. The founder, Yu the Great, is remembered for mastering the great floods of the Yellow River where his father had failed — not by damming the waters but by dredging channels to let them run to the sea. The labor is told as the measure of the man: he is said to have worked for years without returning home, passing his own door and not entering. In the traditional reckoning, the throne came to Yu as a reward for this service to the people, and at his death passed to his son rather than to a chosen successor — the moment, in the Confucian retelling, when rule became hereditary and the age of the sage-kings gave way to dynasty. The last Xia king, Jie, is cast as a tyrant whose misrule justified the Shang conquest: an early instance of the pattern by which a fallen house is held to have forfeited its right to rule.

Whether the Xia existed as the texts describe is unsettled. No writing has been recovered that can be assigned to it; the oracle-bone inscriptions of the Shang, which do survive, name Shang ancestors but offer no clear confirmation of a Xia predecessor. Twentieth-century archaeology uncovered a substantial Bronze Age settlement at Erlitou, in Henan, occupying roughly the time and place the Xia is supposed to have held. Many Chinese scholars identify Erlitou with the Xia, or with its later phase; others hold that an archaeological culture and a dynasty named in much later texts cannot simply be equated, and that the identification reads the records onto the ground. The question carries weight beyond the academy, bound up with how far China’s documented history extends.

For the traditions that grew up afterward, the historical question mattered less than the example. Yu entered Chinese memory as a model ruler and, in some strands, as a figure of near-cosmic authority — his ordering of the rivers read as an ordering of the world, his measured tread later borrowed by Daoist ritual as the “Pace of Yu.” The Xia stands at the head of the dynastic sequence less as a documented period than as the point where Chinese history, as it chose to tell itself, begins.

→ Related: Zhou Dynasty