Hello, and welcome to Chinese Folk Tales.
This is Beibei.
For those of you who are familiar with Chinese history, you might know that the Chinese people are also called the descendants of the Yan and Yellow Emperors.
Yan Huang Zi Sun.
So who were the Yan and the Yellow Emperors?
And that's what we'll talk about today.
In ancient China, there was a chieftain named the Yan Emperor, who was based in southern China.
Later, there was another chieftain named Xuan Yuan, who was known to be unnaturally smart.
Like being able to talk a few days after birth, that kind of smart.
Probably scared and shocked his parents.
He was a great leader, though, and had a reputation of being just.
People say that nothing escaped his eyes and that he would punish anyone who had committed a crime.
His popularity and prestige grew, and people started referring to him as Huang Di or the Huang Emperor.
And Huang means the color yellow. which was the royal color in Chinese culture.
The Yellow Emperor was younger than Yan Emperor, who was already old when Yellow Emperor came to power.
Heads of other smaller tribes were vying for power too, and fighting for land.
And people were suffering.
But the Yan Emperor, was already too old to do anything.
So it was the Yellow Emperor who led the troops and calmed the unrest.
Gradually, more and more tribes decided to follow his leadership, and the Yellow Emperor's prestige grew even more.
But then, in the eyes of the Old Emperor, The young emperor was still a young man.
How dare he challenge the status of the existing emperor?
So you can guess what happened next.
The aging emperor waged a war against the younger one at a place called Banquan.
But you also know how this would end.
The Yellow Emperor won the war and he won for good.
The two tribes merged under the leadership of the Yellow Emperor, and the descendants of those tribes became the Chinese people.
After that war, the power of the Yellow Emperor grew so strong that people started to believe that he was a god from heaven and the biggest god up there too.
As I mentioned in the beginning, the yellow emperor was known to be a fair and just ruler, so much so that some people said he had four faces, one in each direction, so he could see all that happened under the sky like a super-duper surveillance camera.
So where did the Yellow Emperor live?
Do you remember the mountain we talked about in the last episode?
And the name of that mountain will come back again and again in our series.
Yes, it was the Kunlun Mountain, where the Queen Mother of the West also resided in a cave.
The Yellow Emperor, however, lived in a palace suitable for any king.
The deity that was in charge of the palace was quite a character.
He had the face of a human, but the body of a tiger, just like the Queen Mother of the West.
But he had nine tails. no idea why.
Anyway, he was like the butler of the palace, making sure that everything was running smoothly, flowers were always blooming, the phoenixes were not playing with fire and that everything was shining with a glorious heavenly glow.
Now I'm crossing back and forth between the real and the supernatural.
But maybe that's just how people felt about the Yellow Emperor back then.
It was not peace ever after, though.
There was one tribal leader who refused to give him power, and his name was Chiyou.
He was also very powerful and lived in southern China.
Legend has it that his tribe was full of giants and that he had 81 brothers who all had copper heads with iron foreheads and bodies of iron too.
So I figure people like that wouldn't want to be controlled by somebody else.
Even the old emperor, the Yan emperor, had a hard time with him too.
Shi, You wasn't very happy about the rising power of the Yellow Emperor, so he took up his weapon and riled up his brothers, 81 of them, telling them that dude thinks nothing of us.
We gotta show him who is in charge here.
And his brothers were growing rusty with all those metal parts, and they were restless from boredom.
So everyone was itching for a good fight.
Yeah, let's swallow him home!
Whatever boys say when they want to fight.
Chi You and his troops of giants marched from the south to the north, about to wage an important war in ancient history.
As you probably have noticed, we've been crossing a border with the progression of these stories, which started with a relationship between nature and man to that of between man and man and between tribes.
The human society was getting more and more complex with the merging of some tribes, until a state formed.
But conflicts were inevitable in this process.
The war between the Yan and Yellow Emperor and the one to come up between the Yellow Emperor and Chi.
You were important parts of Chinese history.
We're going to save this war for the next episode.
I'll see you then.
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