Page:China- Its State and Prospects.djvu/28

6 their allusions to this period the Chinese are merely giving their version of the events that occurred from Adam to Noah. When Yu ascended the throne, the lands were drained, and China became habitable. About this period wine was discovered; Yu tasted it, and found it sweet, but rejected it, saying, "at some future period wine will occasion the ruin of the country." If now we should consider this to be a description of the antediluvian period, down to the age of Noah, traced according to Chinese recollections, and illustrated by Chinese fancy; and if we should account Yu to be the first founder of the Chinese empire, we should then be assigning them a very high antiquity, without giving any countenance to the extravagant pretensions which their fabulous writers have assumed. These thoughts are merely thrown out as suggestions, in which some sober and judicious men have concurred, who have considered the highly wrought relations of the times of Yaou and Shun as mainly imaginary not according with the state of improvement in other parts of the world at that period, nor even with the condition of China itself, at subsequent epochs of her history.

If then we consider Yu to be the first real character in Chinese history, and place the beginning of his reign at B. C. 2204, or one hundred and four years after the flood, about the age of Peleg, when the earth was divided, we shall find that it just gives time for such an increase of the human family as would admit of emigration, and yet allow for China being in such a state of marsh, as to require draining for the sake of culture, which service was ascribed to the labours of Yu. Thus the empire of China, even when deprived