35 Facts About Yellow Emperor

1.

The Yellow Emperor, known as the Yellow Thearch or by his Chinese name Huangdi, is either an individual deity in Chinese religion, one of the legendary Chinese sovereigns and culture heroes included among the mytho-historical Three Sovereigns and Five Emperors, or a part of the Five Regions' Highest Deities.

2.

The correlation of the colors in association with different dynasties was mentioned in the Lushi Chunqiu, where the Yellow Emperor's reign was seen to be governed by earth.

3.

Yellow Emperor is 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.

4.

Ye Shuxian has associated the Yellow Emperor with bear legends common across northeast Asia people as well as the Dangun legend.

5.

In Han dynasty texts, the Yellow Emperor is called upon as the "Yellow God".

6.

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.

7.

Sima Qian's Records of the Grand Historian begins with the Yellow Emperor, while passing over the others.

8.

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.

9.

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.

10.

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.

11.

Explicit accounts of the Yellow Emperor started to appear in Chinese texts during the Warring States period.

12.

The Yellow Emperor was credited with an enormous number of cultural legacies and esoteric teachings.

13.

The Yellow Emperor became a powerful national symbol in the last decade of the Qing dynasty and remained dominant in Chinese nationalist discourse throughout the Republican period.

14.

The early twentieth century is when the Yellow Emperor was first referred to as the ancestor of all Chinese people.

15.

The Yellow Emperor continued to be revered after the Xinhai Revolution of 1911, which overthrew the Qing dynasty.

16.

The cult of the Yellow Emperor was forbidden in the People's Republic of China until the end of the Cultural Revolution.

17.

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, which was filmed mostly in Taiwanese Hokkien and showed extensive passages of Taiwanese folk opera.

18.

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.

19.

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

20.

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

21.

Yellow Emperor then became a farmer and tamed six different special beasts: the bear, the brown bear, the pi and xiu, the ferocious chu, and the tiger.

22.

Yellow Emperor delivered her son on the mount of Shou or mount Xuanyuan, after which he was named.

23.

In traditional Chinese accounts, the Yellow Emperor is credited with improving the livelihood of the nomadic hunters of his tribe.

24.

Yellow Emperor teaches them how to build shelters, tame wild animals, and grow the Five Grains, although other accounts credit Shennong with the last.

25.

Yellow Emperor is sometimes said to have been partially responsible for the invention of the guqin zither, although others credit the Yan Emperor with inventing instruments for Ling Lun's compositions.

26.

At one point in his reign the Yellow Emperor allegedly visited the mythical East sea and met a talking beast called the Bai Ze who taught him the knowledge of all supernatural creatures.

27.

The Yan Yellow Emperor hailed from a different area around the Jiang River, which a geographical work called the Shuijingzhu identified as a stream near Qishan in what was the Zhou homeland before they defeated the Shang.

28.

The Yan Emperor proving unable to control the disorder within his realm, the Yellow Emperor took up arms to establish his domination over various warring factions.

29.

Yellow Emperor flees to Zhuolu and begs the Yellow Emperor for help.

30.

Yellow Emperor next calls upon the drought demon Nuba to dispel Chi You's storm.

31.

Yellow Emperor then destroys the Nine Li and defeats Chi You.

32.

Later he engages in battle with the Yan Yellow Emperor, defeating him at Banquan and replacing him as the primary ruler.

33.

The Yellow Emperor was said to have lived for over a hundred years before meeting a phoenix and a qilin and then dying.

34.

Yellow Emperor claimed that Liu Bang, the first emperor of the Han dynasty, was a descendant of Huangdi.

35.

Yellow Emperor believed that the ruling house of the Qin dynasty was originated from the Yellow Emperor, but by stating that Qin Shihuang was in fact the child of Qin chancellor Lu Buwei, he perhaps meant to leave the First Emperor out of Huangdi's descent.