A hashtag claiming "experts found cultural relics in Hong Kong to prove the Xia Dynasty's existence" on Feb 25, 2026, but scholars clarified the claim is highly imprecise. The relic in question is the Bin Gong Xu (豳公盨), a middle Western Zhou bronze vessel accidentally discovered in Hong Kong in 2002 and now collected at the Beijing Poly Art Museum.
In an interview with Cover News, Wu Yiqiang from Sichuan University noted the bronze, a grain container with 98 characters in 10 lines of inscriptions, holds the earliest written evidence of the Yu the Great flood control legend. This pushes the legend's recorded origin from the Warring States Period back to the middle Western Zhou, refuting the Doubting Antiquity School's view that Yu was a fictional figure from the Spring and Autumn and Warring States Periods.
Wu stressed the inscriptions only prove the legend was popular in the middle Western Zhou, not the Xia Dynasty's existence. The inscriptions also reflect the Zhou's rule-by-virtue philosophy, with the character "De (virtue)" appearing six times, and its literary style is the first bronze inscription close to The Book of Documents, providing key clues for studying the origins of ancient Chinese books.
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