So, the story certainly comes from the Bronze Age. Yu’s tale was told in a ritual performance, acting out a circuit of the lands of the nine provinces, linked to already existing long-distance pathways of tribute and pilgrimage and crossing its own tracks at Longmen gorge, the place legend said was cut through by Yu to channel the river, and which is still today known as the ‘Gateway of Yu’. What was handed down then was not historical fact but a cultural memory of the process of early state formation. Orally transmitted for many centuries before it was eventually put down in writing, it
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