Yellow Emperor - Historicity

Historicity

The great Chinese historian Sima Qian – and much Chinese historiography following him – considered the Yellow Emperor to be a more historical figure than earlier legendary figures such as Fu Xi, Nüwa, and the Yan emperor. His 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 real historical figures. Their historicity started to be questioned in the 1920s by historians like 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 historiographical current, noted that only in the late Warring States had the Yellow Emperor started to be described as the first ruler of China. Yang thus argued that Huangdi was a late transformation of Shangdi, the supreme god of the Shang 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.

Most scholars now agree that the Yellow Emperor was originally a deity who was later transformed into a human figure. 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."