The "Canon of Yao" and the "Canon of Shun" present a picture of an ideal monarchy administered by benevolent sages. The early Chinese spoke of the Yellow Emperor, Yao, Shun, and Yu as historical figures, just as readily as Julius Caesar pointed to his family tree which included the goddess Venus. But for centuries more skeptical historians in China and the West have seen them as legendary or mythological figures, perhaps representing the fortunes of the many tribes or confederations that must have contended for domination of the Central Plains. Be that as it may, the Shang shu treats them as concrete individuals who speak and act; and when Sima Qian attempted, in the first century BC, to draw up the first comprehensive chronology of China, the reigns of Yao and Shun were marked down as having taken place 44 and 43 reigns before the last Shang king, Shou. Liu Xin, writing a hundred or so years after Sima Qian, put them in the twenty-fourth and twenty-third centuries B.C. (Of course Liu did not use the BC/AD dating; his dating system took the founding of the Zhou dynasty as its point of reference.) Archaeology amply confirms the historical existence of the later figures in our readings (such as King Wen, King Wu, and the Shang king Shou) but the facts about Yao and Shun are still, to say the least, hazy.

Throughout Chinese history, Yao, Shun, and Yu, the heroes of these stories--whom we will call "the sage-kings" for the sake of convenience--have been held up as examples for their selfless dedication to the welfare of their people. They did this by establishing patterns of social behavior, forming a unified and hierarchical system of government, and spreading the techniques of civilization (e.g. agriculture, music, astronomy). Particularly striking in the eyes of the fourth-century BC philosopher Mencius was the fact that the early kings are said to have given up the throne freely to the most capable man in their domains, rather than obtaining power by injustice or the good fortune of noble birth. For this reason, stories told about the sage-kings and their adversaries are a means of criticizing the less-than-ideal political situation of later times, when the Chinese culture-area was in a state of constant war and rulers considered nothing more important than expanding their territories.

According to the Shang shu, the early kings were preoccupied with protecting their people from persistent floods. After engaging the services of several candidates who had tried unsuccessfully to hem in the waters with dams and dikes, Shun appointed Yu, who dug channels to drain the flooded lands. The Shang shu describes Yu's work in somewhat hyperbolic terms, as if, in taming the forces of nature, he had created the Chinese landscape: "Yu distributed the lands. Going along the mountains, he cut down the trees. He established the high mountains and the great rivers." (Shang shu, "Yu gong.")