- Chinese/Japanese: 大禹 (Da Yu / Dai U)
Yu the Great is the legendary founder of China's first dynasty, the Xia Dynasty, sometime around 2200-2100 BCE.
Though his State of Xia was among the most prominent and powerful at the time, there may have been as many as 10,000 individual states (guo) active at that time within the region now known as China.
References
- K.C. Chang, Art, Myth, and Ritual, Harvard University Press (1983), 25-27.