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The Yellow Emperor, or Huangdi 黃帝, is a legendary sage king and culture hero from ancient China who is said to have reigned from 2697 to 2597 (or 2696 to 2598) BCE. His cult became prominent in the late Warring States and early Han period, when he was portrayed as the originator of the centralized state, a patron of esoteric arts, a cosmic ruler, and a lord of the underworld. The narrative of his life was first systematized in the late second century BCE in Sima Qian's Shiji. Since then, Chinese historians have placed him at the beginning of history. In various versions of his myth, he is said to have invented weapons, war, law and punishments, various songs and musical instruments, the calendar, "kickball," medicine, etc. As such, he is often considered as the founder of Chinese civilization. In the late nineteenth century, toward the end of the Qing dynasty, anti-Manchu revolutionaries started to claim that the Yellow Emperor was the ancestor of all Han Chinese. He is now widely regarded as the ancestor of the Chinese nation.

See also: User:Madalibi/Yellow Emperor notes.

Yellow Emperor in Lagerwey and Kalinowski: 555-57, 564-66, 670-75, 784-87, 1077-81.

Etymology and translation

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In English-language scholarship, Huangdi 黄帝 is translated as Yellow Emperor,[1] Yellow Lord,[2] or Yellow Thearch.[3] Other scholars leave Huangdi untranslated.[4] There are also odd forms like the "Power of Yellow" (Loewe) or the "Yellow Sovereign." The differences in translation come from disagreements concerning the meaning of di 帝, which started to refer to human emperors after the First Emperor of China created the term Huangdi 皇帝 in 221 BCE.

History of Huangdi's cult

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Pre-imperial times

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The cult of Huangdi became quite popular in the Warring States Period.[5] Many scholars note that the cult of Huangdi became prominent in the late Warring States and the early Han period. This is when the Yellow Emperor was "associated.... with centralized statecraft."[6]

Late Warring States to early Han

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In the Xia annals of the Shiji, the Xia ancestry is traced from Yu 禹 back to Huang Di, the Yellow Lord."[7]

Huang-Lao. Check Yates.

During the Han dynasty, the Yellow Emperor was one of a few legendary figures that "conferred authority on the technical and medical traditions deemed necessary to a highly civilized world."[8] He was a central figure for the masters of esoteric techniques known as the fangshi 方士.[9] Much of the Huangdi Neijing, a medical text that was first compiled in the first century BCE, is presented as dialogues between the Yellow Emperor and his ministers.[10] The dialogue form was popular during the Han...[11]

"The power and authority attributed to the earliest forms of medical knowledge tended to derive not from a single master's own empirical knowledge, but from the authority of secret and largely anonymous writings attached to the names of legendary paragons in the healing arts: legendary sages, deified cultural heroes, immortals and noble teachers."[12]

Texts from the Eastern Han that proposed a full history of music ascribed many musical titles to the Yellow Emperor.[13]

Role in religion: lord of the underworld; often depicted in tombs.

Wang Mang (ca. 45 BC – 23 AD), of the short-lived Xin dynasty, claimed to descend from the Yellow Emperor in order to justify his overthrow of the Han.[14] As he announced in January of 9 A.D.: "I possess no virtue, [but] I rely upon the fact that] I am a descendant of my august original ancestor, the Yellow Emperor...."[15]

Post-Han

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After the Han the role of the Yellow Emperor in religion diminished.

In the Ming-Qing transition, Wang Fuzhi was the ancestor of racial thinking. Interpreting the Hua-Yi distinction in ethnic terms, he took the Yellow Emperor as the originator of Huaxia and interpreted him as the enemy of other groups which should, Wang argued, have continued to be treated as barbarians.[16] Wang's claim did not concern the Hanzu, but some idea of China.[17]

Element of the Huangdi myth

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As culture hero

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Projected inventor of kickball, a recognized ancestor of moder soccer. Inventor of songs, just war, punishments, astronomy and the calendar, weapons, etc.

As ancestor

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Battle against Chi You

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Chi You, Battle of Zhuolu, which was "regarded as an archetypical event marking the introduction of organized warfare into human society."[18]

Historical status

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  • "黃帝神話" (title of Shen 1997).
  • Lothar von Falkenhausen: "the mythical Yellow Emperor (Huangdi)"[19] Defined in glossary as a "mythical ruler of remote antiquity"[20]
  • Dikötter 1992: "The Yellow Emperor (Huangdi) was a mythical figure thought to have reigned from 2697 to 2597 BC."[21]
  • Sterckx: "legendary cultural hero" (Sterckx 2002: 95)
  • Kern (2000), note 128: "legendary Yellow Thearch"; "equally recent [by the Qin dynasty] myth of the Yellow Thearch as a cosmic ruler"
  • Loewe (1994 [1982]): "In mythology Huang ti is named as the earliest ruler of the world in the remote past" (p. 19)
  • Lo and Li 2010: "the legendary Yellow Emperor" (p. 385)

Historical roles

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Late Qing and Republican period

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  • Guo 2009, Hon 2003, Hon 2010, Ishikawa 2003, Leibold 2006 (Rep.), Liu 1999, Luo 2002; Shen 1997 harvnb error: multiple targets (2×): CITEREFShen1997 (help); Sun 2000; Wang 2002 harvnb error: multiple targets (2×): CITEREFWang2002 (help); Zarrow 2003.
  • Ishikawa, Yoshihiro, "Anti-Manchu Racism and the Rise of Anthropology in Early 20th century China" (PDF), Sino-Japanese Studies.
  • The claim that all Chinese are the descendants of Huangdi first appeared in the early twentieth century, when a racial thinking based on Social Darwinism replaced the kind of Confucian universalism that saw the world as "All Under Heaven."[22] Indeed the Shiji's claim that the Yellow Emperor was at the beginning of history did not mean that he was at the origin of the Chinese nation-state.[23]
  • Liang Qichao's (1873–1929) evolutionary scheme treated the Yellow Emperor as the unifier of dispersed tribes into an "aristocratic monarchy" that already contained the seeds of China's unification by the Qin dynasty in 221 BCE.[24]

Republican period

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  • Despite the historian Gu Jiegang's severe criticism of the myth in the 1920s, he was still officially revered in 1941 as the founder of the nation and initiator of the race."[25]

Notes

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  1. ^ Dikötter 1991, p. 56, 116, etc.; Yates 1997, p. 17, Lewis 2009, p. 565.
  2. ^ Allan 1991, p. 64-67.
  3. ^ Harper 1998, p. 60-65, von Glahn 2004.
  4. ^ Puett 2002, von Glahn 2004, p. 40-43.
  5. ^ Sun 2000, p. 69.
  6. ^ Puett 2002, p. 303.
  7. ^ Allan 1991, p. 64.
  8. ^ Lo and Li 2010, p. 385.
  9. ^ Puett 2002, p. 243.
  10. ^ Lo and Li 2010, p. 384.
  11. ^ Nylan 1996.
  12. ^ Lo and Li 2010, p. 385.
  13. ^ Kern 2010, p. 485.
  14. ^ "Wang Mang (2)" in Loewe 2000, p. 542.
  15. ^ Cited in Wang 2000, pp. 168-69.
  16. ^ Sun 2000, p. 72.
  17. ^ Sun 2000, p. 72–73.
  18. ^ Lewis 1990, p. 148.
  19. ^ von Falkenhausen 2006, p. 165.
  20. ^ von Falkenhausen 2006, p. 531.
  21. ^ Dikötter 1992, p. 116 harvnb error: multiple targets (2×): CITEREFDikötter1992 (help).
  22. ^ Sun 2000, pp. 69 ("中华这个五千年文明古国由黄帝开国、中国人都是黄帝子孙的说法, 则是20 世纪的产品") and 74 (racial thinking vs. Confucian universalism).
  23. ^ Sun 2000, p. 69.
  24. ^ Zarrow 2003, pp. 221 ("aristocratic monarchy") and 223 (seeds of unification).
  25. ^ Dikötter 1992, p. 116 harvnb error: multiple targets (2×): CITEREFDikötter1992 (help).

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「黃帝內經．素問」「形神觀」初探林怡玲

中正高工學報 1 民90.04 頁190-201

Modern

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