Huangdi- Chinese GodDeity"First Sovereign"

Birth and Name

Huangdi bore the surname Gongsun and the personal name Xuanyuan. According to the Shiji, his mother Fubao conceived him after seeing a bolt of lightning circle the star of the Northern Dipper. The child could speak within seventy days of birth.

He was chief of the Youxiong clan in what is now Henan Province, and was called the Yellow Emperor after the color of the Central Plains soil where his people farmed. He organized his territory, trained his people in weapons, and prepared them for the wars that would make him sovereign.

The Battle of Banquan

Huangdi's first war was against Yan Di, the Flame Emperor, who ruled a rival confederation of tribes. The Shiji records them as half-brothers, both descended from the god Shaodian. Their forces met at Banquan on the plains of modern Hebei, and over three engagements Huangdi prevailed. Yan Di submitted. The two emperors merged their peoples into a single confederation, and the compound term "Yan-Huang descendants" still refers to all Chinese people.

The Battle of Zhuolu

Chi You led the Jiuli tribal confederation out of the south. He had a bronze head and an iron forehead, and he commanded eighty-one brothers as fearsome as himself. His people had invented metal weapons. When the two armies met at Zhuolu, Chi You summoned fog so thick that Huangdi's soldiers could not tell north from south.

Huangdi answered by inventing the south-pointing chariot, a mechanical device that always indicated south regardless of visibility. His armies navigated the fog and reformed their lines. He called on the drought goddess Ba to burn away Chi You's storms with her fierce heat, and he had drums made from the hide of the thunder beast Kui, whose sound shook the earth and broke the enemy's nerve.

Chi You was captured and executed. His blood stained the ground, and the red-leafed maples of northern China are said to have sprung from it. His shackles were cast away at Jiezhou in Shanxi and became a grove of trees. The Miao and other southern peoples remember Chi You not as a villain but as their own ancestor.

Writing, Silk, and Medicine

Huangdi's minister Cangjie observed the tracks of birds and animals and from them devised the first Chinese characters. When writing was complete, heaven rained grain and ghosts wept through the night. Humans now possessed the means to preserve knowledge and bind spirits with written words.

His wife Leizu discovered silk when a cocoon fell into her tea and unraveled, revealing a lustrous thread. She developed the techniques of raising silkworms and weaving that became one of China's defining arts. Temples to Leizu survive in Sichuan Province.

With his physician Qi Bo, Huangdi explored the principles of medicine through dialogues preserved in the Huangdi Neijing, a text compiled during the Han Dynasty that attributes its wisdom to the Yellow Emperor's era.

The Dragon at Qiao Mountain

After a reign of one hundred years, Huangdi cast a great bronze tripod at Qiao Mountain in Shaanxi Province. When the tripod was complete, a dragon descended from the clouds. Huangdi mounted it and rose toward heaven, followed by more than seventy of his ministers who clung to the dragon's mane and scales. Those left behind grasped at the dragon's whiskers, but the hairs broke off and fell to earth, becoming a plant called longxu, dragon whiskers. Their cries echoed across the mountains as the Yellow Emperor disappeared into the sky.