The Great in the context of "Yu the Great"

Yu the Great or Yu the Engineer was a legendary king in ancient China who was credited with "the first successful state efforts at flood control", his establishment of the Xia dynasty, which inaugurated dynastic rule in China, and for his upright moral character. He figures prominently in the Chinese legend titled "Great Yu Controls the Waters" (大禹治水; Dà Yǔ zhì shuǐ). Yu and other sage-kings of ancient China were lauded for their virtues and morals by Confucius and other Chinese teachers. He is one of the few Chinese monarchs who is posthumously honored with the epithet "the Great".

There is no contemporary evidence of Yu's existence as traditionally attested in the Shiji. Yu is said to have ruled as sage-king during the late 3rd millennium BC, which predates the oracle bone script used during the late Shang dynasty—the oldest known form of writing in China—by nearly a millennium. Yu's name was not inscribed on any artifacts which were produced during the proposed era in which he lived, nor was it inscribed on the later oracle bones; his name was first inscribed on vessels which date to the Western Zhou period (c. 1045 – 771 BC).