The Earth Appears

Slowly, the water went down. The hills, which had been islands for a generation, stood out of the receding flood like the backs of animals emerging from a lake. The plain, drowned for as long as any living person could remember, showed itself again: first the tops of ruined roofs, then the tops of trees, then the brown wet earth, black and rich, that the flood had left behind it.

The people came down from the trees. They came down slowly at first, afraid to believe it. They touched the earth with their hands and found it solid. They walked where the water had been, and the water was not there. They looked at each other, and some of them laughed, and some of them wept, for they had not imagined they would ever stand on dry ground again.

Yu walked among them, and he was not celebrated as a hero, because he looked like nothing but a laborer, and spoke like nothing but a laborer, and would not allow himself to be called anything else. He marked the new boundaries of the land. He divided it into nine provinces, so that the people might know where the fields began and ended. He measured the channels he had dug, and wrote down their courses, so that after he was gone no one would clog them again.

He did not rest. When the people were settled back on their land, he walked the channels again, to see that the silt had not blocked them, to see that the dikes still held. He traveled from province to province, eating the same coarse food as the farmers, sleeping in the same huts. He had spent thirteen years making the earth livable; he intended to keep it so.

Emperor Yao was long dead. The throne had passed to Shun, who had himself been a man of the people, chosen for his virtue. Shun looked at the work Yu had done — the nine provinces, the great rivers running clean, the people eating again — and he saw that the age belonged to Yu. He did not fear it. He gave up the throne, of his own will, and handed it to the man who had dug the channels.

Yu became the founder of the Xia, the first of the great houses that would rule the Middle Kingdom. He did not build himself a palace of grandeur. He built it of the same earth he had moved all his life. He ruled as he had labored: early, and late, and without complaint. The people called him Yu the Great, not because he was a conqueror, but because he had conquered the water.

They say that when he was old, he walked one last time to the bank of the great river, and looked out over the plain he had made. The water ran clear now, within its banks. The fields were green. There were children playing where the flood had once stood over their fathers' heads. He did not boast. He is reported to have said only: my father tried to hold the water back. I let it go. That is all.

His son Qi, who had grown up not knowing him, came to him at last and took his hand. Yu looked at the young man — tall, strong, his own son — and understood, too late, that the work had not left him time to be a father. But the child was whole, and the land was whole, and that, he decided, was enough. The nine provinces he had made would outlive him. His father's failure had been made good.

And the people, long after, told the story of the man who did not build walls. They told it to their children as a lesson in how to live: when a force is greater than you, do not oppose it. Find its nature. Find the path it wishes to take. Then walk beside it, and it will carry you home.

To this day, the rivers of China run in the channels Yu's hands first cut. The sea receives them. The earth stands. And the name of Yu the Great is remembered, not as a king who won battles, but as a man who, for thirteen years, never once went home to his own door.