Abstract:
It is not appropriate to simply think that Yu succeeded in taming the waters by dredging while Gun failed by blocking up. In fact, it was impossible to tame the waters by dredging at the beginning of the Great Flood. The only way possible then was to build dams as Gun did in his day. It was only in the late days when the flood began to recede that Yu was able to tame the waters by dredging. As the ancient legend has it, Gun and Gonggong were both chieftains of agricultural tribes which settled in the central reaches of the Huanghe River. When the flood came, they could only construct dams to defend their homeland, only to bring great disasters to those tribes in the lower reaches. As a consequence, they had to migrate to border regions after they were attacked. All this reveals an important phenomenon in the early days of Chinese history: People didn't build dams on rivers.
