The tomb of the first farmer

The Yan Emperor's tomb is not a single place but a claim made in several, and the sources are careful to say that his real burial site cannot be verified. The mausoleum that the state has recognised since the Song dynasty stands in Yanling County, in the east of Hunan, where tradition says sacrifices were offered as early as the Han dynasty. Its temple was founded in the early Song, in the Qiande reign of the emperor Taizu, and the sources record that the court, having settled on this spot as the tomb, raised a temple before the mound and enshrined his image to make the offerings. The site is a national key cultural relic, and modern leaders have left inscriptions there, while the state post office issued a stamp in its honour. The precinct gathers a temple and a burial mound into one place, and around them the older texts are quoted: the Western Jin writer Huangfu Mi recorded that the emperor died and was buried in the Changsha region, and the later scholar Luo Mi placed the burial at the tail of the tea country of Changsha.

The worship of the Yan Emperor is an old state rite. From the Song dynasty onward the central government fixed on the Yanling mausoleum as the recognised tomb, entered it in the dynastic statutes, the Song huiyao, the Ming huiyao and the Qing statutes, and dispatched officials to offer sacrifice there on the court's behalf, a practice the sources record through the centuries. The popular pilgrimage runs alongside the state one: on the seventh day of the seventh lunar month and at the Qingming festival, people gather at the mausoleum for a grand public ceremony, with worshippers coming from home and from overseas Chinese communities to pay their respects. The figure at the centre of it all is the ancestor, for the Han Chinese have long described themselves as the descendants of Yan and Huang, of the Yan Emperor and the Yellow Emperor, and the two are together counted as the founders of the Chinese people. So the pilgrimage is ancestor worship, a return to one of the two founding figures. Sacrifice to the Yan Emperor is an ancient rite, recorded in the state rituals of old and set down in the Book of Rites, where he is the emperor of the summer offering.

The Yan Emperor is remembered above all as a giver of skills. He is credited with inventing agriculture, with making the plough and teaching the people to sow the five grains and to taste them, and with tasting the hundred herbs, a day at a time, to learn their medicinal properties, so that he became at once the god of farming and the founder of medicine. He is also the fire god and the god of the hearth, remembered for teaching the people to kindle fire and to cook, and the surname Jiang and the name Shennong, the divine farmer, both attach to him, while his descendants are said to include the fire god Zhurong. The sources note that an academic conference in 2004 reached the consensus that the Yan Emperor and Shennong were the same person. Around this figure the mausoleum does its work: it turns a legendary inventor into a tangible ancestor, a mound to which the living return, and a story of agriculture and medicine that the site keeps telling. His youngest daughter, the girl Nüwa, is said to have drowned by the sea and been changed into the bird Jingwei.