Legend has it that in Yao, there was a great flood in the world and the Yellow River flooded year after year. The flood washed away villages and houses and flooded the land. Sometimes people are forced into trees, and the residents at the top of the mountain can't grow crops.
Yao was determined to control water and eliminate disasters for the people, and called a meeting of tribal alliance leaders. The tribal leaders elected Gun to lead the water control work.
The method used by the gun is to build a dike to prevent water. It is said that this method was invented by a man named * * during the reign of Emperor Zhuan Xu. At that time, the water damage was not too serious, and it was still very effective to control water in this way. However, gun used this method to prevent and control fierce floods, but it did not help. As a result, the dam just built today will be washed away by the flood tomorrow; Sometimes it is washed away before it is built. In this way, Gun was cured for nine years without success. On the contrary, the embankment soil was washed downstream by water, silting up the river, and the places that were not flooded before were also flooded. After Shun ascended the throne, he killed Gun, and according to the choice of everyone, he sent Gun's son Yu to lead the troops to control the water.
Gun water control failed, but accumulated a lot of experience and lessons. Summing up his father's experience and lessons, he realized that the reason for Gun's failure was to build dams passively and not pay attention to solving the problem fundamentally. If there is no fixed channel for water, no matter how high the embankment is, it is useless. After consulting many experienced old people, he finally found a new way. Yu learned that in order to eliminate floods, it is not only necessary to build dikes to stop water, but more importantly, to dredge the blocked riverbed and dig canals to let water flow out.
How to dredge the river bed and dig channels? At that time, because people's activities were relatively small, no one fully understood the source, flow direction and geography of the river. So, Yu led some people around the middle and lower reaches of the Yellow River to inspect the mountains and rivers. Finally, it was decided to dredge the canal systematically to draw the flood out.
Dredging river beds and digging channels is not an easy task. At that time, there were neither shovels nor pickaxes, only weak digging tools such as stone axes, clams and water bottles. Although people were able to smelt copper at that time, the quantity was too small to be used to make agricultural production tools.
However, people don't want to rest. Under the leadership of Li, young people of various tribes use these simple tools to dig and fight against nature. They cut through hard rocks to communicate with the river bed and dig channels. You can imagine how difficult it was to control water at that time!
In this struggle, I practiced, not afraid of wind and rain, not afraid of the scorching sun, not afraid of the cold, "I left my hometown for thirteen years and dared not enter", and always worked hard with others.
After more than ten years of hard work, dredging excavated many riverbed channels, and finally introduced the flood into the big river, and then eliminated the flood. This is the legendary "Yu Shu Jiu He". Future generations admire: if there is no Dayu to control water, we can only have fish in these places, and there will be people there!
In the struggle for water control, people have made a new invention, that is, learning. When people dig and build dams, they find that there is still water underground. Since then, people have known how to dig wells and fetch water. In the past, although there were vast plains in the Yellow River basin that could be reclaimed, it was impossible to settle there because it was inconvenient to get water. After the invention of drilling wells for water, people began to March on those wasteland. The area of cultivated land will continue to expand.
Although Dayu's flood control is a historical legend, it may not be true in some places. However, this story tells us that there is little struggle between human beings and nature, and they are constantly moving from "the kingdom of necessity" to "the kingdom of freedom".