The Yellow Emperor or Huang Di (Chinese: 黃帝, Simplified Chinese: 黄帝, pīnyīn: huángdì) is a legendary Chinese sovereign and cultural hero who is said to be the ancestor of all Han Chinese. One of the Five Emperors, the Yellow Emperor is said by tradition to have reigned from 2698 BCE to 2599 BCE.

The legend of his westwards retreat in the war against the eastern Emperor Chi You (蚩尤) at the Battle of Zhuolu (涿鹿) is seen as the establishment of the Han Chinese nationality.

Among his other accomplishments, the Yellow Emperor has been credited with the invention of the principles of Traditional Chinese medicine. Nèijīng (内經, The Medical Canon of the Yellow Emperor), was supposedly composed in collaboration with his physician Qi Bó (岐伯). However, modern historiographers generally consider it to have been compiled from ancient sources by a scholar living between the Zhou and Han dynasties, more than 2,000 years later. His interest in natural health and preventing and treating diseases meant he is said to have lived to the age of 111, and to have attained immortality after his physical death.

In the legend, his wife Lúo Zǔ (螺祖) taught the Chinese how to weave the silk from silkworms, and his historian Cāng Jié (倉頡) created the first Chinese characters.

Legend says that the Yellow Emperor invented the compass during a battle against Chi You who used a sandstorm as camouflage to hide his army. Thanks to the compass, the Yellow Emperor found out where Chi You was and defeated him. The swirling chair in his chariot was also a compass so that he would always face south, which the Chinese people consider to be good Feng Shui. He is also said to have played a part in the creation of the Guqin, together with Fuxi and Shennong, and to have invented the earliest form of the Chinese calendar, and its current sexagenary cycles are counted based on his reign.

Huang Di is historically remembered as a dragon because some scholars believe that Huang Di used a snake as his coat of arms. As he defeated enemies he would incorporate their emblems into his own. Huang Di was immortalized as a dragon that looks like his emblem. That explains why the Chinese dragon has the body of a snake; the scales and tail of a fish, the antlers of a deer, the face of a qilin (a deer-like mythical creature with fire all over its body), two pairs of eagle talons, and the eyes of a tiger-lion. Since the Chinese consider Huang Di as their ancestor, they sometimes refer to themselves as "the descendants of the dragon".

The actual existence of the Yellow Emperor is questionable, at best. The period of his reign precedes written history in China by more than a thousand years. Thus, the tales of his exploits might easily be embellished or even altogether apocryphal.

Yellow Emperor in popular culture

• Huang Di appears as a God in the strategy game Rise of the Middle Kingdom made by the now defunct company Sierra Entertainment. In the game he is a patron of hunting and has the skills needed for leading men into battle.

• There have been TV dramas made in mainland China depicting the life of Huang Di. However, their historical accuracy is questionable. They are semi-fictional because their focus is mainly on martial arts, Wuxia and drama.

See also

• Emperor of China
• Three August Ones and Five Emperors

References

External links

• The Yellow Emperor

Chinese mythology | Guqin

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