#2 - Origins 2: Five Emperors, Twelve Islands

Episode 2: Five Emperors, Twelve Islands

Last time, we ended with the reign and eventual passing of the final mythical Sovereign, the Yellow Emperor Huangdi in 2598 BCE.  Today, we’ll explore the second stage of China’s prehistoric origin story as it begins to traverse the chasm between mythology and what we consider to be historic fact; the period of the Five Emperors.  As with the four Three Sovereigns, we have a bit of historical disagreements over how many Five Emperors there actually were.  All individual lists, of course, have the correct number, but there is some disagreement over who’s in and who’s out.  In all, we get six main contenders, so as with last time, let’s be fair and look at them all.

We start, then, with the Emperor Shaohao.  He’s kind of our odd-man-out in this story, as only a minority of sources (albeit a sizeable minority) includes him as one of the Five Emperors.  We’ll discuss more on the “why” of that in a bit. 

In the traditional oral mythos, Shaohao was born of the union of a Weaver Goddess and the planet Venus as they floated along the Milky Way. As such, it’s quite appropriate that his name can be translated as “Child of the Summer Sky.”  Regardless, after descending to Earth, he established a great kingdom to the East of the Huaxia Chinese Empire.  It was a kingdom of birds… which is to say, literally, actual birds… his Lord Chancellor was a phoenix, his Minister of Education a hawk, and his minister of Education a pigeon… because, why not, right?  Upon the death of the august Yellow Emperor, however, he left his Bird Kingdom to his son and assumed the Western throne.

However, there is a somewhat more… grounded… version of Shaohao’s reign.  Rather than the product of some cosmic one-night-stand, this version tells us that Shaohao was the eldest son of the Yellow Emperor.  Shaohao would become emperor in, according to our timeline, 2597 BCE upon the death of his father Huangdi.  Over the course of his reign, he would expand relations with, and eventually politically incorporate the territory to the south of the main Huaxia Empire, belonging to a people called the LoLo, or the Yi.  Though they recognized the dominance of Emperor Shaohao, they remained a largely culturally autonomous people thereafter, having never submitted to full integration with the burgeoning Huaxia collective.  In fact, even today the Yi People are recognized as a minority people in China.  They remain primarily herders, farmers, and nomadic hunters in the difficult, mountainous regions of Southeast China, including what today includes most of Sichuan, Yunnan, Guizhou, and Guanxi provinces, as well as Northern Vietnam and Thailand.  Their estimated modern ethnic population is somewhere around 7.8 million.

Shaohao’s rule was largely peaceful and uneventful.  That’s good for him, but kind of sparse for us.  His son, named Jiaoji, proved himself dishonorable and unfit to rule, and so Shaohao sought out a more suitable candidate to succeed him.  We’ll come to see that this will be one of the defining aspects of the Five Emperors period – and one of the main reasons it’s not remembered as a “Dynasty,” as such.  Unlike the dynastic successions that will follow, the Five Emperors period is marked by a distinct lack of primogeniture succession, or even direct father-son succession at all.  Though all of our six ruler today are the blood of Huangdi, only one is going to end up being the son of the previous Emperor (and him not even the son that had been selected to rule!).  While we’ll later be discussing the emperors and kings of China in terms of successive lines, right now it’s more of an erratic zig-zag.  These guys were more concerned with actual fitness to rule, over bloodlines and birth order… a state of affairs that would not be repeated in a significant way in the Middle Kingdom for about 4500 years, and would occur only sporadically worldwide for another 4300.  And some wonder why we call them sage-kings.  Shaohao ruled over his expanded empire for 84 years.  As mentioned, he denied his son the throne, and instead selected his half-brother’s son Zhuanxu to succeed him.  He died in 2514 BCE.

There is, however, another vein of historical thought, specifically in the Shiji, asserting that Shaohao never ruled.  Instead, there was a period of extended interregnum between the death of the Yellow Emperor and the eventual election – yes, election – of Zhuanxu to the Imperial throne.  Despite this seeming schism in the quasi-historical record, fortunately we can all reconcile with the universally recognized successor (or not) to Shaohao…