Hello, and welcome to Chinese Folk Tales.
This is Beibei.
So as I mentioned, the Great Yu that tamed the floods was getting old.
Who would take his place as the next emperor for China?
The man Great Yu was thinking of was called Bo Yi, who was his assistant during all the years when they traveled around the country trying to fight the floods.
So Bo Yi shared Great Yu's Medal of Honor, and I guess they really worked well together.
So the Great Yu was ready to pass the crown to him, except for just one obstacle.
Great Yu had a son.
His name was Qi, and there is this interesting story about his birth.
According to the legends, when Great Yu was all devoted to his irrigation project, his wife was greatly concerned about his health.
One day, she made a nice meal and wanted to bring it to him.
When she arrived at a mountain at which Yu and his team were hacking their way through, they were literally splitting the mountain apart manually.
Through clouds of dust, she saw a figure, big and dark, digging away at the mountain, in the shape of a huge bear.
She was so terrified that she dropped the box of food that she had with her and turned around and ran.
But the big bear had seen her and started chasing her.
That was not fun for a fragile lady.
And what's more, she was pregnant.
She ran and ran, and soon came to a cliff.
She had nowhere else to go.
So, she turned into a rock.
Yeah, that's how the legend went.
The bear couldn't stop itself in time and ran into the rock and turned into a human, who was the Great Yu, of course.
It's natural to wonder what happened to the baby she was carrying.
It was still in the rock.
But soon, the rock split open, and a baby popped out.
Boom!
There was his son, whom he named Qi.
On a side note, another super significant figure in Chinese culture also bursted out of a big piece of rock.
And that was the Monkey King.
As I mentioned at the start, Great Yu wanted to carry on the tradition of passing the throne to the most suitable person instead of one's own son.
But at that time, Qi was already a grown man, and he was not too happy with that arrangement.
And for someone who burst out of a rock as a baby, he couldn't have had a mild temper.
I'm the son of the emperor, and an emperor I will be.
He was determined.
He rallied up his own troop and launched an attack on Boiyi.
The son of Great Yu, Qi won the battle and became the next emperor.
Before this, Yao passed his throne to Shun, and then Shun to Yu.
None of them were related by blood.
Starting with Qi, it was family under heaven, meaning that everything under heaven belonged to the emperor, and it marked the start of a line of hereditary dynasties.
The dynasty that Qi started was called Xia, the character for summer, so he was called Xiaqi.
He also convened a big assembly near the same mountain Tuu, where a high altar was built to offer sacrifices to heaven and earth.
This great gathering of sacrifice marked the rule of Xiaqi.
This line of hereditary dynasties went all the way to the Qing dynasty, some 4,000 years later.
So that's the story of Xia Qi, and also the end of the stories about Great Yu.
We're also approaching the end of ancient Chinese mythology.
400 years later, Xia Dynasty was replaced with Shang Dynasty.
And from then on there was written history in China, even if they were just characters on the back of tortoise shells.
It's not the end of our podcast, though.
Just the really ancient part.
In lots of the stories that we've heard, there have been lots of mystical figures with weird body parts and they did weird things.
They are an important component of these folktales, so we will spend more time to listen to their stories.
Hope you will stay with me, and I'll see you next time.
Bye for now.
Special thanks go out to Sanlian Zhongdu for their help in creating the content for this show.
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