Physician, Sage and Patron of the Dao

Two strands of tradition gave Huangdi an afterlife well beyond legendary history. In medicine, the foundational classic of Chinese healing, the Huangdi Neijing (the Inner Canon of the Yellow Emperor), is cast as a dialogue between Huangdi and his ministers on the workings of the body, health and disease, so that the Yellow Emperor became the mythic patron and fountainhead of Chinese medical knowledge, his name attached to its oldest and most authoritative text.

In religion, Huangdi was taken up by Daoism: in the early imperial period a school of thought and practice known as Huang-Lao paired him with Laozi as joint patrons of a teaching of rulership and self-cultivation, and later Daoist tradition made him a model of the ruler who attained immortality and ascended to heaven, in some accounts riding up on a dragon. Between these strands the Yellow Emperor became far more than a figure of the distant past: the ancestor of the Chinese people, the patron of their medicine, and a sage of the Way. Modern scholarship treats him as a legendary rather than historical figure, but his symbolic importance as a founder of Chinese civilisation has remained powerful into the present.