Shennong

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.

Shennong's legendary search for healing plants left its name permanently on real geography: the rugged, densely forested mountain region of Shennongjia in northwestern Hubei province takes its name directly from him, and local tradition holds that the name means Shennong's ladder, commemorating a legend that the Divine Farmer, seeking rare medicinal herbs on the region's steep, forest-choked peaks, had to build a wooden scaffold or ladder to climb the cliffs and reach plants otherwise inaccessible.

The area's remoteness and biological richness, it is one of the few regions in central China where sizeable areas of old-growth subtropical forest survive, and it is now protected as a UNESCO World Heritage site and nature reserve known for its rare wildlife, has made the association with a legendary herb-gathering culture hero feel especially apt to visitors and to the Chinese public, even though the link is one of place-name folklore rather than documented ancient history. Shennongjia has also become associated in modern popular culture with cryptozoological legend, persistent but unverified reports of a Yeti-like wildman said to inhabit its forests, a modern layer of mystery added to a landscape already named for a mythical search for hidden natural knowledge. The mountain thus keeps Shennong's name alive in the everyday geography of modern China far more concretely than any surviving temple or festival dedicated to him by name.