In the history of China, Emperor Yan was one of the cultural ancestors of the Chinese nation, and people in China claimed to be descendants of the Chinese people. This shows that Emperor Yan made an important contribution to the historical development of China.
Through legend, we can know that Yan Di's contribution mainly includes the invention of farming and medicine.
According to legend, people in ancient times lived a life of fishing, hunting and gathering, and often did not have enough to eat. The merciful Emperor Yan taught people to grow grain, so that people could learn to farm and get a stable food source. He also told the sun to emit enough light and heat to make the grain grow healthily. Therefore, Emperor Yan is also considered as the mythical sun god.
After the benevolent Emperor Yan solved people's food problem, there is still a problem that always bothers him, that is, people will be disturbed by diseases, and they often eat poison by mistake during the collection process, so Emperor Yan is determined to taste all the medicinal materials and identify their properties to treat the disease.
In one version of the legend, Emperor Yan once got a whip to beat a hundred herbs. Processed herbs, whether toxic or cold or hot, will show their medicinal properties. Thanks to this whip, Emperor Yan will was not poisoned.
However, this version is too mythical, and there are other versions circulating that Emperor Yan really tried medicine himself and was poisoned 70 times a day, all of which were detoxified by drinking tea, and there was no danger to his life. But in the end, Emperor Yan accidentally ate a poisonous plant, and after eating it, he was heartbroken and died of poisoning! Therefore, later generations named this plant "heartbroken grass".
But no matter which version of the legend, we can get such a message. Emperor Yan did taste all kinds of herbs for the benefit of the people, but there are so many poisonous weeds in the world. Why didn't Emperor Yan die of poisoning? Even in the second edition of the legend, it can be seen that before the grass was cut off, Emperor Yan never ate herbs with particularly strong toxicity by mistake (the poison that can be decomposed by tea leaves should not be highly toxic, right? )?
As we all know, the deification of Emperor Yan in fairy tales actually comes from the worship of our ancestors. Legends about Emperor Yan are mostly recorded in ancient books after the Spring and Autumn Period and the Warring States Period. For thousands of years, most of them rely on folk word of mouth. Since it is word of mouth, it is blurred, not to mention the legend that has been circulating for thousands of years.
The ancients used to personify tribes, so we can think that one of the inferences is that perhaps Shennong, which people passed on by word of mouth, is actually not a person, but a tribe. This tribe is good at agriculture and medicine. In the long-term development process, they gave birth to a prosperous farming civilization and had a tradition of collecting and developing herbs.
This tribe has accumulated rich experience in medicine for our ancestors, so under the word of mouth from generation to generation, a tribe who is good at medicine has been personified as a tribal leader who has tasted all kinds of herbs for the people, but in fact this tribal leader represents a tribe's medical achievements for hundreds or even thousands of years.
The second inference is that Emperor Yan is synonymous with tribal leaders, not specific people. Because of all kinds of legends about Emperor Yan, such as pottery making, inventing markets, inventing farming and the battle of Zhuolu later, many of them have a great span in the historical development.