According to the description in history textbooks, the first feudal dynasty in China was the Qin Dynasty, and the first hereditary dynasty in China was the Xia Dynasty, which was more than 4,000 years old. Before the Xia Dynasty, the positions of the chiefs were all jointly elected or abdicated by the previous chief, but there was a change in dayu's generation. Because Dayu made a great contribution to the treatment of the flood, Dayu was elected as the leader.
After Dayu grew older, he also followed the tradition of giving up the position of leader to a man named Yi. However, Yi felt that he was not qualified enough to succeed Dayu and transferred the leader to Dayu's son Qi. Historians believe that this is the turning point from the public world to the home world. And because class differentiation began to occur during the reign of Qi, the two classes of slave owners and slaves became distinct, and there was a system of differentiating and managing different things, so historians believe that the time of Qi's reign was the beginning of the Xia Dynasty, and Qi was therefore called Xia Qi.
The Xia Dynasty is the earliest dynasty recorded in the history books, but before the Xia Dynasty there was another dynasty, the Yu Dynasty, which did not appear in the history books, but in the Spring and Autumn Period and the Warring States Period, the concept of Yu Dynasty appeared in many works of the Hundred Sons and Hundreds of Families. For example, in the Analects, there is "On the occasion of Tang Yu, Yu Si was prosperous." The chapter "Gao Tao Mo" in the Book of Shang tells the story of Gao Tao Mo, the minister of the Yu Dynasty, and the Zuo Zhuan and Chinese have more descriptions of the Yu Xia Shang Dynasty.
What does Tang Yu mean? What exactly was the time of the Yu Dynasty? According to the descriptions in these Spring and Autumn classics, Emperor Yao, one of the Three Emperors and Five Emperors, invented a system after taking over as tribal leader, and he would appoint some able people in the tribe to divide their labor and assist in management, at this time there was already a rudimentary form of the state, also known as Tao Tang. In his later years, Emperor Yao discovered that his son Danzhu was not a man of merit and responsibility, so he passed the position to his favorite Shun. After the death of Emperor Yao, Shun inherited many of Emperor Yao's ideas, following the system used by Emperor Yao during his reign and the distribution of talents, and this era is the Yu Dynasty mentioned above, and in the twenty-eight years after Yao Chan ceded to Emperor Shun, people developed very quickly, so it was called the Tang Yu Period, and the Tang Yu Period was also considered to be the first prosperous era in China. The People of the Shang Zhou Dynasty also referred to the period of ancient tribes until the Three Emperors of Yao Shunyu as the leader of the Yu Dynasty, which began in 3600 BC and continued to 2100 BC, a total of about 1500 years. Since the Warring States period, the Yu Dynasty has basically disappeared from all ancient books, and according to historians, it is likely that Qin Shi Huang destroyed all the books that recorded the Zen system of the Yu Dynasty in order to strengthen the majesty of the imperial power. Therefore, many Western countries, including some historians in China, believe that the Yu Dynasty did not exist and was invented by the Shang and Zhou dynasties. Although there is some truth in such a statement, it obviously does not stand up to scrutiny, and the Shang and Zhou people have nothing to do to make up these legends of ancient dynasties, and the records about the Yu Dynasty are basically the same. In the 20th century, Western scholars also believed that the Xia Dynasty did not exist, and did not recognize the existence of the Xia Dynasty until after the excavation of the Xia Dynasty murals; they also believed that the ancient Shu civilization did not exist, and the excavation of the Shang Bronze Sacred Tree made them shut their mouths, and maybe one day archaeologists would be able to find evidence of the real existence of the Yu Dynasty.