In a remarkable breakthrough that would change the mythological history of China forever, a team of scientists in the country have published a study that the Great Flood that laid the foundations of the Xia Dynastry did indeed take place and like in the original mythological theory, the flood did indeed submerge large parts of the country around 4000 thousand years ago. Evidence on that mythical flood had not been found for these many years but the recent study, headed by a seismologist at Peking University named Wu Qianlong has has provided genuine evidence.
As the New York Times has reported, "Now a team of researchers led by Wu Qianlong, a former Peking University seismologist, say in a study published this week in the journal Science that they've indeed found evidence that a flood submerged a vast swath of the country almost 4,000 years ago, possibly lending weight to a longstanding - though controversial - theory that the Xia Dynasty did exist as China's first unified state. Using radiocarbon dating of juvenile bones and soil samples along the Yellow River, Wu's team established that an earthquake triggered a huge landslide, damming the waterway in 1920 B.C."
The report went on to add, "The researchers deduced that for six to nine months about 15 trillion liters (4 trillion gallons) of water built up behind a wall of rock and dirt - about half the size of Lake Mead behind Hoover Dam - near Jishi Gorge in today's Qinghai Province. When the dam broke, it tore through the gorge at 500 times the Yellow River's average discharge and submerged the North China Plain that is considered the cradle of Chinese civilization.
The flood would have predated by several centuries the first written records kept on oracle bones. Historical texts from about 1,000 B.C. first mentioned a legendary Xia ruler, Yu, who had devised a system of dredges to control a great flood that spanned generations. He was said to have been based around Jishi Gorge, according to various texts, and his ability to combat natural disasters and earn a heavenly mandate to rule established him as a model for generations of subsequent Chinese rulers."
