Chapter 8 addresses the formation of the overarching social order through which the Zhou states were legitimized, namely the Xia legacy and the imagined world of the Yu’s tracks. I argue that the legend of Great Yu’s flood control odyssey and its nonary division of the legendary landscape represent a legacy of religious responses to the climatological and ecological crisis of the late third millennium BCE, from which the Sandai political tradition and later occult religious traditions evolved. Instead of an early imperial invention, I argue that the Yugong (Tributes of the Yu) ideology presents aspects of the prehistoric religious network, which served as a blueprint for political experimentation and state formation during the second and first millennium BCE. From the archaeological perspective, the Xia legacy in the Zhou political rhetoric represents a juxtaposition of historical knowledge stemming from multiple episodes of political experimentation in the late third and the early second millennium BCE. This palimpsest of history became the foundation of Zhou political philosophy and classic thought.