Yellow Emperor
From Freepedia
The Yellow Emperor or Huang Di (Chinese: 黃帝, Simplified Chinese: 黄帝, pīnyīn: huángdì) is a legendary Chinese sovereign and cultural hero who is said to be the ancestor of all Han Chinese.
One of the Five Emperors, the Yellow Emperor is said by tradition to have reigned from 2698 BC to 2598 BC.
The legend of his retreat to west in the war against the eastern Emperor Chi You at the Battle of Zhuolu (涿鹿) is seen as the establishment of the Han Chinese nationality.
Among his other accomplishments, the Yellow Emperor has been credited with the invention of the principles of Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM). Nèijīng (内經, The Medical Canon of the Yellow Emperor), was supposedly composed in collaboration with his physician Qi Bó (岐伯). However, modern historiographers generally consider it to have been compiled from ancient sources by a scholar living between the Zhou and Han dynasties, more than 2,000 years later.
Huang Di is historically remembered as a dragon because some scholars believe that the Huang Di used a snake for his coat of arms. As he defeated enemies he would incorporate their emblems into his own. Huang Di was immortalized into a dragon that looks like his emblem. That explains why the Chinese dragon has a body of a snake; the scales and tail of a fish; the antlers of a deer; the face of a qilin (a deer-like mythical creature with fire all over its body); and two pairs of talons of eagles; and the eyes of a demon.
Also, since the Chinese consider Huang Di as their ancestor, they sometimes refer to themselves as "the descendants of the dragons".
In the legend, his wife Lúo Zǔ (螺祖) taught the Chinese how to weave silk from silkworms, and his historian Cāng Jié created the first Chinese characters.
