The story of how Yǚ came to be made emperor is very important to the Confucians. The myth says that the world started to become flooded and the father of Yǚ (whose name was 鯀 Gǔn) tried to fix the problem by building dams. Gǔn was not successful because the water just kept coming and when it went over the top of the dams then all of the water that had built up came out very fast. So Yǚ took over the job of saving China and cleaned out all of the rivers so that the extra water could easily go to the sea.