Yellow Emperor

The Yellow Emperor, also known as the Yellow Thearch, or Huangdi ( zh, t=黃帝, s=黄帝, first=t) in Chinese, is a mythical Chinese sovereign and culture hero included among the legendary Three Sovereigns and Five Emperors. He is revered as a deity individually or as part of the Five Regions Highest Deities () in Chinese folk religion. Regarded as the initiator of Chinese culture, he is traditionally credited with numerous innovations – including the traditional Chinese calendar, Taoism, wooden houses, boats, carts, the compass needle, "the earliest forms of writing", and ''cuju'', a ball game. Calculated by Jesuit missionaries, as based on various Chinese chronicles, Huangdi's traditional reign dates begin in either 2698 or 2697 BC, spanning one hundred years exactly, later accepted by the twentieth-century promoters of a universal calendar starting with the Yellow Emperor.

Huangdi's cult is first attested in the Warring States period, and became prominent late in that same period and into the early Han dynasty, when he was portrayed as the originator of the centralized state, as a cosmic ruler, and as a patron of esoteric arts. A large number of texts – such as the '' Huangdi Neijing'', a medical classic, and the '' Huangdi Sijing'', a group of political treatises – were thus attributed to him. Having waned in influence during most of the imperial period, in the early twentieth century Huangdi became a rallying figure for Han Chinese attempts to overthrow the rule of the Qing dynasty, remaining a powerful symbol within modern Chinese nationalism.

Names

''Huangdi''

Until 221 BC, when Qin Shi Huang of the Qin dynasty coined the title ''huangdi'' () – conventionally "emperor" - the character ''di'' did not refer to earthly rulers but to Shangdi, the highest god of the Shang dynasty (c. 1600–1046 BC) pantheon. In the Warring States period (c. 475–221 BC), the term ''di'' on its own could also refer to the deities associated with the five Sacred Mountains of China and colors. Huangdi (), the "yellow ''di''", was one of the latter. To emphasize the religious meaning of ''di'' in pre-imperial times, historians of early China commonly translate the god's name as "Yellow Thearch" and the first emperor's title as "August Thearch", in which "thearch" refers to a godly ruler.

In the late Warring States period, the Yellow Emperor was integrated into the cosmological scheme of the Five Phases, in which the color yellow represents the earth phase, the Yellow Dragon, and the center. The correlation of the colors in association with different dynasties was mentioned in the '' Lüshi Chunqiu'' (late 3rd century BC), where the Yellow Emperor's reign was seen to be governed by earth. The character ''huang'' ("yellow") was often used in place of the homophonous ''huang'' , which means "august" (in the sense of 'distinguished') or "radiant", giving Huangdi attributes close to those of Shangdi, the Shang supreme god.

Xuanyuan and Youxiong

The '' Records of the Grand Historian'', compiled by Sima Qian in the first century BC, gives the Yellow Emperor's name as "Xuan Yuan" ( < Old Chinese ( B-S) *''qʰa ��a ', lit. "Chariot Shaft"). Third-century scholar Huangfu Mi, who wrote a work on the sovereigns of antiquity, commented that Xuanyuan was the name of a hill where Huangdi had lived and that he later took as a name. The '' Classic of Mountains and Seas'' mentions a Xuanyuan nation whose inhabitants have human faces, snake bodies, and tails twisting above their heads; Yuan Ke, a contemporary scholar of early Chinese mythology, "noted that the appearance of these people is characteristic of gods and suggested that they may reflect the form of the Yellow Thearch himself". The Qing dynasty scholar Liang Yusheng (, 1745–1819) argued instead that the hill was named after the Yellow Emperor. Xuanyuan is also the name of the star Regulus in Chinese, the star being associated with Huangdi in traditional astronomy. He is also associated to the broader constellations Leo and Lynx, of which the latter is said to represent the body of the Yellow Dragon ( ''Huánglóng''), Huangdi's animal form.

Huangdi was also referred to as "Youxiong" (). This name has been interpreted as either a place name or a clan name. According to British sinologist Herbert Allen Giles (1845–1935), that name was "taken from that of uangdi'shereditary principality". William Nienhauser, a modern translator of the ''Records of the Grand Historian'', states that Huangdi was originally the head of the Youxiong clan, which lived near what is now Xinzheng in Henan. Rémi Mathieu, a French historian of Chinese myths and religion, translates "Youxiong" as "possessor of bears" and links Huangdi to the broader theme of the bear in world mythology. Ye Shuxian has also associated the Yellow Emperor with bear legends common across northeast Asia people as well as the Dangun legend.

Other names

Sima Qian's '' Records of the Grand Historian'' describes the Yellow Emperor's ancestral name as Gongsun ().

In Han dynasty texts, the Yellow Emperor is also called upon as the "Yellow God" ( ''Huángshén''). Certain accounts interpret him as the incarnation of the "Yellow God of the Northern Dipper" ( ''Huángshén Běidǒu''), another name of the universal god ('' Shangdi'' or '' Tiandi'' ). According to a definition in apocryphal texts related to the '' Hétú'' , the Yellow Emperor "proceeds from the essence of the Yellow God".

As a cosmological deity, the Yellow Emperor is known as the "Great Emperor of the Central Peak" ( ''Zhōngyuè Dàdì''), and in the '' Shizi'' as the "Yellow Emperor with Four Faces" ( ''Huángdì Sìmiàn''). In old accounts the Yellow Emperor is identified as a deity of light (and his name is explained in the ''Shuowen jiezi'' to derive from ''guāng'' , "light") and thunder, and as one and the same with the "Thunder God" ( ''Léishén''), who in turn, as a later mythological character, is distinguished as the Yellow Emperor's foremost pupil, such as in the '' Huangdi Neijing''.

Historicity

The Chinese historian Sima Qianand much Chinese historiography following himconsidered the Yellow Emperor to be a more historical figure than earlier legendary figures such as Fu Xi, Nüwa, and Shennong. Sima Qian's '' Records of the Grand Historian'' begins with the Yellow Emperor, while passing over the others., and chapter endnotes.

Throughout most of Chinese history, the Yellow Emperor and the other ancient sages were considered to be historical figures. Their historicity started to be questioned in the 1920s by historians such as Gu Jiegang, one of the founders of the Doubting Antiquity School in China. In their attempts to prove that the earliest figures of Chinese history were mythological, Gu and his followers argued that these ancient sages were originally gods who were later depicted as humans by the rationalist intellectuals of the Warring States period. Yang Kuan, a member of the same current of historiography, noted that only in the Warring States period had the Yellow Emperor started to be described as the first ruler of China. Yang thus argued that Huangdi was a later transformation of Shangdi, the supreme god of the Shang dynasty's pantheon..

Also in the 1920s, French scholars Henri Maspero and Marcel Granet published critical studies of China's accounts of high antiquity. In his ''Danses et légendes de la Chine ancienne'' Dances and legends of ancient China" for example, Granet argued that these tales were "historicized legends" that said more about the time when they were written than about the time they purported to describe.

In the "middle of the 0thcentury, a group of" Chinese "historians proposed the theory that Three Sovereigns and Five Emperors">he Three Sovereigns and Five Emperors were originally Chinese gods who became thought of as human during the later period of the Zhou dynasty. Most scholars now agree that the Yellow Emperor originated as a god who was later represented as a historical person. K. C. Chang sees Huangdi and other cultural heroes as "ancient religious figures" who were " euhemerized" in the late Warring States and Han periods. Historian of ancient China Mark Edward Lewis speaks of the Yellow Emperor's "earlier nature as a god", whereas Roel Sterckx, a professor at University of Cambridge, calls Huangdi a "legendary cultural hero".

Origin of the myth

The origin of Huangdi's mythology is unclear, but historians have formulated several hypotheses about it. Yang Kuan, a member of the Doubting Antiquity School (1920s–40s), argued that the Yellow Emperor was derived from Shangdi, the highest god of the Shang dynasty. Yang reconstructs the etymology as follows: Shangdi → Huang Shangdi → Huangdi → Huangdi , in which he claims that ''huang'' ("yellow") either was a variant Chinese character for ''huang'' ("august") or was used as a way to avoid the naming taboo for the latter. Yang's view has been criticized by Mitarai Masaru and by Michael Puett.

Historian Mark Edward Lewis agrees that ''huang'' and ''huang'' were often interchangeable, but disagreeing with Yang, he claims that ''huang'' meaning "yellow" appeared first. Based on what he admits is a "novel etymology" likening ''huang'' to the phonetically close ''wang'' (the "burned shaman" in Shang rainmaking rituals), Lewis suggests that "Huang" in "Huangdi" might originally have meant "rainmaking shaman" or "rainmaking ritual." Citing late Warring States and early Han versions of Huangdi's myth, he further argues that the figure of the Yellow Emperor originated in ancient rain-making rituals in which Huangdi represented the power of rain and clouds, whereas his mythical rival Chiyou (or the Yan Emperor) stood for fire and drought.

Also disagreeing with Yang Kuan's hypothesis, Sarah Allan finds it unlikely that such a popular myth as the Yellow Emperor's could have come from a taboo character. She argues instead that pre-Shang "'history'," including the story of the Yellow Emperor, "can all be understood as a later transformation and systematization of Shang mythology." In her view, Huangdi was originally an unnamed "lord of the underworld" (or the "Yellow Springs"), the mythological counterpart of the Shang sky deity Shangdi. At the time, Shang rulers claimed that their mythical ancestors, identified with "the ensuns, birds, east, life, ndthe Lord on High" (i.e., Shangdi), had defeated an earlier people associated with "the underworld, dragons, west." After the Zhou dynasty overthrew the Shang dynasty in the eleventh century BC, Zhou leaders reinterpreted Shang myths as meaning that the Shang had vanquished a real political dynasty, which was eventually named the Xia dynasty. By Han times – as seen in Sima Qian's account in the ''Shiji'' – the Yellow Emperor, who as lord of the underworld had been symbolically linked to the Xia, had become a historical ruler whose descendants were thought to have founded the Xia.

Given that the earliest extant mention of the Yellow Emperor was on a fourth-century BC Chinese bronze inscription claiming that he was the ancestor of the royal house of the state of Qi, Lothar von Falkenhausen speculates that Huangdi was invented as an ancestral figure as part of a strategy to claim that all ruling clans in the "Zhou dynasty culture sphere" shared common ancestry.

History of Huangdi

Earliest mention

Explicit accounts of the Yellow Emperor started to appear in Chinese texts during the Warring States period. The earliest extant mention of Huangdi is an inscription on the Chen Hou Yinqi '' dui'' (), cast during the first half of the fourth century BC by the royal family (surnamed Tian ) of the state of Qi, a powerful eastern state. As the Tian family had usurped the throne of Qi, establishing such a divine heritage would positively affect their claim to legitimacy.

Harvard University historian Michael Puett writes that the Qi bronze inscription was one of several references to the Yellow Emperor in the fourth and third centuries BC within accounts of the creation of the state. Noting that many of the thinkers who were later identified as precursors of the Huang–Lao – "Huangdi and Laozi" – tradition came from the state of Qi, Robin D. S. Yates hypothesizes that Huang–Lao originated in that region.

Warring States period

The cult of Huangdi became very popular during the Warring States period (5th century – 221 BC), a period of intense competition between rival states which ended with the unification of the realm by the state of Qin. In addition to his role as ancestor, he became associated with "centralized statecraft" and emerged as a figure paradigmatic of emperorship.

The state of Qin

In his ''Shiji'', Sima Qian claims that the state of Qin started worshipping the Yellow Emperor in the fifth century BC, along with Yandi, the Fiery Emperor. The altars were established at Yong (near modern Fengxiang County in Shaanxi province), which was the capital of Qin from 677 to 383 BC. By the time of King Zheng, who became king of Qin in 247 BC and First Emperor of a unified China in 221 BC, Huangdi had become by far the most important of the four "thearchs" (''di'' ) who were then worshiped at Yong.

The ''Shiji'' version

The figure of Huangdi had appeared sporadically in Warring States texts. Sima Qian's ''Shiji'' (or '' Records of the Grand Historian'', completed around 94 BC) was the first work to turn these fragments of myths into a systematic and consistent narrative of the Yellow Emperor's "career". The ''Shiji''s account was extremely influential in shaping how the Chinese viewed the origin of their history.

The ''Shiji'' begins its chronological account of Chinese history with the life of Huangdi, whom it presents as a sage sovereign from antiquity. It recounts that Huangdi's father was Shaodian and his mother was Fubao ().Chinareviewnews.com
"The ugliest among the empresses and consorts of past ages"
. Retrieved on August 8, 2010. The Yellow Emperor had four wives. His first wife Leizu of Xiling bore him two sons. His other three wives were his second wife Fenglei (), third wife Tongyu () and fourth wife Momu (). The emperor had a total of 25 sons,. 14 of whom began their own surnames and clans. The oldest was Shaohao or Xuan Xiao, who lived in Qingyang by the Yangtze River. Changyi, the second son, lived by the Ruo River. When the Yellow Emperor died, he was succeeded by Changyi's son, Zhuan Xu.

The chronological tables found in chapters 13 of the ''Shiji'' represent all past rulers – legendary ones such as Yao and Shun, the first ancestors of the Xia, Shang, and Zhou dynasties, as well as the founders of the main ruling houses in the Zhou sphere – as descendants of Huangdi, giving the impression that Chinese history was the history of one large family.

Imperial era

The (), compiled by Dai De towards the end of the Western Han dynasty, carries a quote attributed to Confucius:

The Yellow Emperor was credited with an enormous number of cultural legacies and esoteric teachings. While Taoism is often regarded in the West as arising from Laozi, many Chinese Taoists claim the Yellow Emperor formulated many of their precepts, including the quest for "long life". The '' Yellow Emperor's Inner Canon'' ( ''Huángdì Nèijīng''), which presents the doctrinal basis of traditional Chinese medicine, was named after him. He was also credited with composing the Four Books of the Yellow Emperor ( ''Huángdì Sìjīng''), the '' Yellow Emperor's Book of the Hidden Symbol'' ( ''Huángdì Yīnfújīng''), and the "Yellow Emperor's Four Seasons Poem (軒轅黃帝四季詩)" included in the Tung Shing fortune-telling almanac.

"Xuanyuan (+ number)" is also the Chinese name for Regulus and other stars of the constellations Leo and Lynx, of which the latter is said to represent the body of the Yellow Dragon. In the Hall of Supreme Harmony in Beijing's Forbidden City, there is also a mirror called the "Xuanyuan Mirror".

In Taoism

In the second century AD, Huangdi's role as a deity was diminished because of the rise of a deified Laozi. A state sacrifice offered to "Huang-Lao jun" was not offered to Huangdi and Laozi, as the term Huang-Lao would have meant a few centuries earlier, "yellow Laozi". Nonetheless, Huangdi kept being considered as an immortal: he was seen as a master of longevity techniques and as a god who could reveal new teachings – in the form of texts such as the sixth-century '' Huangdi Yinfujing'' – to his earthly followers.

Twentieth century

The Yellow Emperor became a powerful national symbol in the last decade of the Qing dynasty (1644–1911) and remained dominant in Chinese nationalist discourse throughout the Republican period (1912–1949). The early twentieth century is also when the Yellow Emperor was first referred to as the ancestor of all Chinese people.

Late Qing

Starting in 1903, radical publications started using the projected date of his birth as the first year of the Chinese calendar. Intellectuals such as Liu Shipei (1884–1919) found this practice necessary in order to "preserve the anrace" (''baozhong'' ) from both dominance by Manchu people and foreign encroachment. Revolutionaries motivated by Anti-Manchuism such as Chen Tianhua (1875–1905), Zou Rong (1885–1905), and Zhang Binglin (1868–1936) tried to foster the racial consciousness they thought was missing from their compatriots, and thus depicted the Manchus as racially inferior barbarians who were unfit to rule over Han Chinese. Chen's widely circulated pamphlets claimed that the "Han race" formed one big family descended from the Yellow Emperor. The first issue (Nov. 1905) of the ''Minbao'' ("People's Journal"), which was founded in Tokyo by revolutionaries of the Tongmenghui, featured the Yellow Emperor on its cover and called Huangdi "the first great nationalist of the world." It was one of several nationalist magazines that featured the Yellow Emperor on their cover in the early twentieth century. The fact that Huangdi meant "yellow" emperor also served to buttress the theory that he was the originator of the "yellow race".

Many historians interpret this sudden popularity of the Yellow Emperor as a reaction to the theories of French scholar Albert Terrien de Lacouperie (1845–94), who in a book called ''The Western Origin of the Early Chinese Civilization, from 2300 B.C. to 200 A.D.'' (1892) had claimed that Chinese civilization was founded around 2300 BCE by Babylonian immigrants. Lacouperie's " Sino-Babylonianism" posited that Huangdi was King Nakhunte, a Mesopotamian tribal leader who had led a massive migration of his people, from the Bak ethnic group, into China around 2300 BC and founded what later became Chinese civilization. European sinologists quickly rejected these theories, but in 1900 two Japanese historians, Shirakawa Jirō and Kokubu Tanenori, omitted these criticisms and published a long summary that presented Lacouperie's views as the most advanced Western scholarship on China. Chinese scholars were quickly attracted by "the historicization of Chinese mythology" that the two Japanese authors advocated.

Anti-Manchu intellectuals and activists who searched for China's "national essence" (''guocui'' ) adapted Sino-Babylonianism to their needs. Zhang Binglin explained Huangdi's battle with Chi You as a conflict opposing the newly arrived civilized Mesopotamians to backward local tribes, a battle that transformed China into one of the most civilized places in the world. Zhang's reinterpretation of Sima Qian's account "underscored the need to recover the glory of early China." Liu Shipei also presented these early times as the golden age of Chinese civilization. In addition to tying the Chinese to an ancient center of human civilization in Mesopotamia, Lacouperie's theories suggested that China should be ruled by the descendants of Huangdi. In a controversial essay called ''History of the Yellow Race'' (''Huangshi'' ), which was published serially from 1905 to 1908, Huang Jie (; 1873–1935) claimed that the "Han race" was the true master of China because it was descended from the Yellow Emperor. Reinforced by the values of filial piety and the Chinese patrilineal clan, the racial vision defended by Huang and others turned vengeance against the Manchus into a duty owed to one's ancestors.

Republican period

The Yellow Emperor continued to be revered after the 1911 Revolution, which overthrew the Qing dynasty. In 1912, for instance, banknotes carrying Huangdi's effigy were issued by the new Republican government. After 1911, however, the Yellow Emperor as national symbol changed from first progenitor of the Han race to ancestor of China's entire multi-ethnic population. Under the ideology of the Five Races Under One Union, Huangdi became the common ancestor of the Han Chinese, the Manchu people, the Mongols, the Tibetans, and the Hui people, who were said to form the Zhonghua minzu, a broadly understood Chinese nation. Sixteen state ceremonies were held between 1911 and 1949 to Huangdi as the "founding ancestor of the Chinese nation" () and even "the founding ancestor of human civilization" ().

Modern significance

The cult of the Yellow Emperor was forbidden in the People's Republic of China until the end of the Cultural Revolution. The prohibition was halted during the 1980s when the government reversed itself and resurrected the "Yellow Emperor cult". Starting in the 1980s, the cult was revived and phrases relating to the "Descendants of Yan and Huang" were sometimes used by the Chinese state when referring to people of Chinese descent. In 1984, for example, Deng Xiaoping argued for Chinese unification saying "Taiwan is rooted in the hearts of the descendants of the Yellow Emperor," whereas in 1986 the PRC acclaimed the Chinese-American astronaut Taylor Wang as the first of the Yellow Emperor's descendants to travel in space. In the first half of the 1980s, the Party had internally debated whether this usage would make ethnic minorities feel excluded. After consulting experts from Beijing University, the Chinese Academy of Social Science, and the Central Nationalities Institute, the Central Propaganda Department recommended on March 27, 1985, that the Party speak of the Zhonghua Minzu – the "Chinese nation" broadly defined – in official statements, but that the phrase "sons and grand-sons of Yandi and the Yellow Emperor" could be used in informal statements by party leaders and in "relations with Hong Kong and Taiwanese compatriots and overseas Chinese compatriots".

After retreating to Taiwan in late 1949 at the end of the Chinese Civil War, Chiang Kai-shek and the Kuomintang (KMT) ruled that the Republic of China (ROC) would keep paying homage to the Yellow Emperor on April 4, the National Tomb Sweeping Day, but neither he nor the three presidents that succeeded him ever paid homage in person.. In 1955, the KMT, which was led by Mandarin speakers and still poised on retaking the mainland from the Communists, sponsored the production of the movie ''Children of the Yellow Emperor'' (''Huangdi zisun'' ), which was filmed mostly in Taiwanese Hokkien and showed extensive passages of Taiwanese folk opera. Directed by Bai Ke (1914–1964), a former assistant of Yuan Muzhi, it was a propaganda effort to convince speakers of Taiyu that they were linked to mainland people by common blood. In 2009 Ma Ying-jeou was the first ROC president to celebrate the Tomb Sweeping Day rituals for Huangdi in person, on which occasion he proclaimed that both Chinese culture and common descent from the Yellow Emperor united people from Taiwan and the mainland. Later the same year, Lien Chan – a former Vice President of the Republic of China who is now Honorary Chairman of the Kuomintang – and his wife Lien Fang Yu paid homage at the Mausoleum of the Yellow Emperor in Huangling, Yan'an, in mainland China..

Gay studies researcher Louis Crompton has cited Ji Yun's report in his popular ''Notes from the'' Yuewei ''Hermitage'' (1800), that some claimed the Yellow Emperor was the first Chinese to take male bedmates, a claim that Ji Yun dismissed. Ji Yun argued that this was probably a false attribution.

Today, Xuanyuanjiao based on Taiwan represents an organised form of Yellow Emperor worship married to Confucian orthodoxy.

Elements of Huangdi's myth

As with any myth, there are numerous versions of Huangdi's story, emphasizing different themes and interpreting the main character's significance in different ways.

Birth

According to Huangfu Mi (215–282), the Yellow Emperor was born in Shou Qiu ("Longevity Hill"),, note 6. which is today on the outskirts of the city of Qufu in Shandong. Early on, he lived with his tribe near the Ji River – Edwin Pulleyblank states that "there seems to be no record of a Ji River outside the myth" – and later migrated to Zhuolu in modern-day Hebei. He then became a farmer and tamed six different special beasts: the bear (), the brown bear (), the ''pí'' () and ''xiū'' () (which later combined to form the mythical Pixiu), the ferocious ''chū'' (), and the tiger ().

Huangdi is sometimes said to have been the fruit of extraordinary birth, as his mother Fubao conceived him as she was aroused, while walking in the country, by a lightning bolt from the Big Dipper. She delivered her son on the mount of Shou (Longevity) or mount Xuanyuan, after which he was named.

Another story states that "Huang Di came into being when the energies that instigated the beginning of the world merged with one another, and created human beings by placing earthen statues at the cardinal points of the world and leaving them exposed for 300 years. During that time, the statues became filled with the breath of creation and eventually began to move fter the 300 years Huang Di...received his magic powers when he was 100 years old. He xian''">Xian_(Taoism).html" ;"title="ecame a ''Xian (Taoism)">xian''and, riding a Chinese dragon">dragon