Yellow Emperor
The Yellow Emperor, also known as the Yellow Thearch or Huangdi, was 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 帝 did not refer to earthly rulers but to Shangdi, the highest god of the Shang dynasty pantheon. In the Warring States period, 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, where the Yellow Emperor's reign was seen to be governed by earth. The character huang 黃 was often used in place of the homophonous huang 皇, which means "august" 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". 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 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 , 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, that name was "taken from that of hereditary 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
's Records of the Grand Historian describes the Yellow Emperor's family name as Gongsun. Xu Shen's Shuowen Jiezi, however, describes the Yellow Emperor taking on the family name 姬 Jī after the Ji River he lived close to.In Han dynasty texts, the Yellow Emperor is also called upon as the "Yellow God". Certain accounts interpret him as the incarnation of the "Yellow God of the Northern Dipper", another name of the universal god. According to a definition in apocryphal texts related to the Hétú 河圖, 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", and in the Shizi as the "Yellow Emperor with Four Faces". In old accounts the Yellow Emperor is identified as a deity of light and thunder, and as one and the same with the "Thunder God", 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.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 , 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 century, a group of" Chinese "historians proposed the theory that " 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, argued that the Yellow Emperor was derived from Shangdi, the highest god of the Shang dynasty. Yang reconstructs the etymology as follows: Shangdi 上帝 → Huang Shangdi 皇上帝 → Huangdi 皇帝 → Huangdi 黄帝, in which he claims that huáng 黃 either was a variant Chinese character for huáng 皇 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 huáng 黄 and huáng 皇 were often interchangeable, but disagreeing with Yang, he claims that huáng meaning "yellow" appeared first. Based on what he admits is a "novel etymology" likening huáng 黄 to the phonetically close wāng 尪, Lewis suggests that "huáng" 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 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", the mythological counterpart of the Shang sky deity Shangdi. At the time, Shang rulers claimed that their mythical ancestors, identified with "the suns, birds, east, life, the Lord on High", 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.