The Divine Farmer Who Tasted the Herbs

Shennong, the Divine Farmer, is a legendary culture hero of China credited with the invention of agriculture and herbal medicine, one of the mythical sovereigns of the earliest age. Tradition holds that he taught the people to plough and sow the grains, invented the plough itself, and instituted markets; and, most famously, that he personally tasted the hundred herbs to discover their medicinal and toxic properties, in some tellings poisoning himself many times over in the process, so founding the Chinese materia medica.

The great early pharmacopoeia, the Shennong Bencao Jing (the Divine Farmer's Classic of Materia Medica), was attributed to him, a retrospective ascription that placed the roots of Chinese medicine under a divine patron. Often shown horned or ox-headed and clad in leaves, he is identified with the Yan Emperor, and with the Yellow Emperor he is invoked in the phrase descendants of Yan and Huang as a mythic ancestor of the Chinese people. He belongs to legend rather than to history.