From Legend to Archaeology: The Xia Dynasty

Chinese historical tradition, systematized above all in the "Records of the Grand Historian" (Shiji), written by the court historian Sima Qian in the first century BCE, places the Xia dynasty (conventionally dated c. 2070-1600 BCE) as the first dynasty of Chinese civilization, founded by the legendary Yu the Great after he brought a great flood of the Yellow River under control. For much of the twentieth century, however, Chinese historiography itself subjected this tradition to searching criticism: the "Doubting Antiquity Movement" (Gushibian), led by the scholar Gu Jiegang in the 1920s, applied rigorous philological analysis to traditional texts and showed that many accounts of early antiquity had been composed or elaborated centuries after the events they claimed to describe.