The Flame Emperor's tomb at Zhuzhou

The tomb sits at Luyuanpo in Yanling County, in the mountains at Zhuzhou's southern edge, and it belongs to a man no historian can date. The Yan Emperor — the Flame Emperor — is a figure of pre-dynastic legend, remembered as a master of fire in an age before writing; the character yan means flame, and one modern reading connects the name to the burning of fields in slash-and-burn farming. Whether he was one man or a line of chiefs carrying a fire title is itself debated. The older question needed a conference to settle: in 2004, Chinese scholars agreed by consensus that the Yan Emperor and Shennong, the Divine Farmer, are the same person. Tradition says this ancestor was buried in these hills, and the claim proved durable enough to organise a landscape, because Han Chinese have long called themselves the descendants of Yan and Huang — the Flame and Yellow Emperors — which makes his tomb, for pilgrims, a family grave. The site gives that devotion a fixed address: a mound and precinct tended as the region's chief ancient monument, the shrine around which a whole county's identity was later arranged.

The county renamed itself for the grave. These hills were long the remote south of the region — a day's travel from the rail yards — and the county went by the old name of Ling until 1994, when it became Yanling, 'Yan's tomb', explicitly to wear the shrine. The change is a fair sample of how Zhuzhou works. The rail capital far to the north is a creature of railways: a county first set up here in the Three Kingdoms era, then a market town until the 1950s, when the First Five-Year Plan made it one of eight key national industrial cities at the crossing of the Beijing–Guangzhou and Shanghai–Kunming lines. Zhuzhou's own self-description is the 'locomotive spirit', an immigrant city hauled into being by trains, its factories making electric locomotives, aircraft engines, hard alloys and chemicals. Around that modern core the prefecture keeps a second, older geography: the Lu and Mi river valleys, the porcelain city of Liling, and in the south this shrine county. Yanling today trades on the ancestor — the tomb is the county's signature site — and the visitor traffic south of the freight lines is the prefecture's other economy.

The legend that made the farmer also made the pharmacist. Shennong's remembered contributions are a short list of firsts: wooden ploughs and the opening of fields; the planting of the five grains; pottery for cooking and storage; the weaving of cloth; and — the item that cost him his life — the tasting of the hundred herbs, meeting seventy poisons in a single day, in order to learn which plants heal. That story is a foundation myth of Chinese medicine: knowledge of herbs won by experiment on a body, in a time before physicians existed. Fire belongs to the same package. The Flame Emperor is remembered as teaching people to make fire by friction, to cook food and to cast metal tools, and the fire god Zhurong is counted among his descendants, so kitchen and forge both trace their lineage to him. His cult proved durable enough to enter the classics: the Han ritual texts set the Yan Emperor among the pre-dynasts sacrificed to in summer, honoured at the same altar as Zhurong and the kitchen god. A visitor who reads the shrine's story meets, in the end, a complete domestic world — grain in the pot, fire under it, medicine in the pouch — hung on one legendary name and one hillside grave.