Previously, no scientific evidence had been found for a corresponding flood.
But now a Chinese-led team has placed just such an event at about 1,900BC.
Writing in Science Magazine, the researchers describe a cataclysmic event in which a huge dam, dumped across the Jishi Gorge by a landslide, blocked the Yellow River for six to nine months.
``The sediments from this outburst flood are up to 20m thick and up to 50m higher than the Yellow River - indicating an unprecedented, devastating flood``- Dr Wu Qinglong, Nanjing State University.
When the dam burst, up to 16 cubic kilometres of water inundated the lowlands downstream.
The evidence for this sequence of events comes from sediments left by the dammed lake, high up the sides of Jishi Gorge, as well as deposits left kilometres downstream by the subsequent flood.
Lead author Dr Wu Qinglong, from Nanjing Normal University, said he and colleagues stumbled on sediments from the ancient dam during fieldwork in 2007.
"It inspired us to connect the next possible outburst flood with the abandonment of the prehistoric Lajia site 25km downstream," he told journalists in a teleconference.
"But at that time we had no idea what the evidence of a catastrophic outburst flood should be."
The Lajia site, famously home to the world`s oldest noodles, is known as China`s Pompeii; its cave dwellings and many cultural artefacts were buried by a major earthquake.
"In July 2008 I suddenly realised that the so-called black sand previously revealed by archaeologists at the Lajia site could be, in fact, the deposits from our outburst flood," Dr Wu said.
"The subsequent investigation confirmed this speculation and showed that the sediments from this outburst flood are up to 20m thick, and up to 50m higher than the Yellow River - indicating an unprecedented, devastating flood."
He and his colleagues suggest in their paper that the very same earthquake that destroyed the Lajia dwellings probably dammed the river upstream. Less than a year later, the waters returned with a vengeance.
"It reached up to 38m above the modern river level," said co-author Dr Darryl Granger, from Purdue University in the US.
"The flood was about 300-500,000 cubic metres per second. That`s roughly equivalent to the largest flood ever measured on the Amazon river; it`s among the largest known floods to have happened on Earth during the past 10,000 years."
`Just great luck`
Using carbon dating - on flood deposits and even on fragments of bone from earthquake victims at Lajia - the researchers date the megaflood to 1,922BC, "plus or minus about 28 years", Dr Granger said.
If the flood was indeed the source of the Emperor Yu legend then the founding of the Xia dynasty presumably occurred within a few decades, in about 1,900BC.
This date is 200-300 years later than many previous estimations. But Emperor Yu`s tale is difficult to pin down using traditional historical sources; the story survived as oral history for a millennium and its first known written record dates to around 1,000BC.
On the other hand a later, circa 1,900 commencement for the Xia supports that idea that this first dynasty coincided with the transition from Stone Age to Bronze Age ways of living.
Some archaeologists have already linked the Xia dynasty with the Erlitou culture, an early Bronze Age society known from digs elsewhere in the Yellow River valley.
Dr David Cohen from National Taiwan University, another co-author, said the study was remarkable because of the multiple lines of evidence involved.
"We have the geological evidence of just a huge outburst flood, which is incredible in itself," he said.
"But then there`s this coincidence of it co-occurring with the destruction of the Lajia site - which is able to give us very, very precise dates… and then that this flood was of such a scale and corresponds in time, and along the Yellow River, with both the beginnings of Bronze Age civilisation and the legend of the great flood itself.
"It`s just this amazing story. All these different approaches coming together - it is just great luck."
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