The three missing years

The slips that survived the thief’s torch went by the cartload to the Jin court, where the books were put into the script of the day. Among them was a chronicle of the reigns before the dynasties; its entries on the flood in the reign of Yao follow, as the Kaifeng manuscript of the court transcription carries them:

In his sixty-first year he commanded Gun to wall up the waters of the flood. The waters were vast; they embraced the mountains and stood against heaven. Nine years, and the work was not accomplished. Gun took the breathing soil, which grows of itself and is never used up, and he did not wait for it to be given. In his sixty-ninth year Gun was put to death at Feather Mountain. The body was not spoiled. [····] …opened it with the blade of Wu, and the one who completes came out of the belly. What remained went down into the Feather Deep. In his seventy-fifth year he commanded Yu to set the waters in order. Di gave the soil. Yu did not wall the waters. He opened the ways and led them out to the sea. A dragon went before him and drew the courses of the waters with its tail. Three times he passed his own gate and did not go in. Out of the Luo a turtle came up with a writing on its back. He received it. The nine provinces were made fast. The waters kept to the ways they had been shown.

The transcription carries a subjoined notice in the transcriber’s hand:

“Your servant collated the slips of this bundle. The binding cords had perished; the order was restored by the year-heads. Where the record is broken, the thief’s fire is answerable: he lit his taking by burning what he had come among, and the entries of three years are ash. Your servant has read the chronicle many times. It gives the water no origin and no anger. The water arrives as an officer arrives at a posting; it is opposed nine years and does not punish; it is given its way and it goes; and at its going it renders up a writing, as a magistrate leaving office renders up his registers. My masters teach that the flood was the way of water in that age. Your servant has copied the entries as they stand.”

The court’s catalogue of the recovery lists seven bundles too broken to be given titles. This chronicle is held to be one of the seven. The lost entries span the three years between the death at Feather Mountain and the opening of the body. See finding 06. Transcription confidence: 96%. No other record of the three years is known.