Hongshanren 红山人 - An Asia Youth Media Website

Nvwa the Goddess

Who is the goddess honoured by the Niuheliang temple? the most prominent female figure of Chinese mythology is Nvwa, who, in one line of stories, created humans by moulding mud, paralleling the old testament story about Adam and Eve; in another line she, with her brother/husband Fuxi, survived a great flood to ensure the continuation of the human race, similar to Noah (in fact even the names nu-wa and no-ah are somewhat similar). However, Nvwa does not appear in Shang oracle text or Chou written history, and her earliest mention was in the Warring States period poetry of Qu Yuan. Stories similar to Fuxi-Nvwa also exist in Miao and other tribes' oral history. (a comment on her name 女娲，娲 means "female skeleton", from the days when children eat their parents after death and preserved the skeleton to worship; 剐 is skeleton with knife; 窝 is skeleton with roof above, or shrine, or small building, hence bird nest or animal den；蜗牛 is creature with house on its back and horns like cow; it is also useful to mention that when king darius of persia conquered western india, he met tribes that ate their parents, an incident recorded by Herodotus)

The intriguing question is whether the ancestral worship temple of Chu state, where Qu Yuan saw wall paintings depicting ancient legends that inspired him to write the poem Tianwen, was similar in concept to the Hongshan Goddess Temple, though of course much more elaborate. While the Chu temple is not available to be viewed today, we do have some Han Dynasty wall paintings that are probably similar though those below do not show what we need to establish a Hongshan connection.

The one below is specifically on the

Fuxi-Nvwa legend, showing them together with Pangu the separator of earth and heaven to create the world humans live in

Below: A more elaborate version. This  also shows the couple, again holding the compass and the right angle (compass for round and right angle for square, or round heaven square earth, one manifestation of yin-yang contrast, male-female being another), this time main figures in their own right with subsidiary figures attending them

Left: We do have one actual Chu era painting from a tomb showing the phoenix above and the dragon on the left directing the soul of the dead person up to heaven

If we assume that the Hongshan people migrated southwards after 3000BC and joined a branch of the Zhurong 祝融 tribes, which spread along the southern banks of Yellow River around the time, till the Xias and Shangs conquered some parts and drove the others west and south; those that settled along the Han river in the Henan-Hubei border region subsequently became the Chu people; then the possibility that they inherited the temple building and wall painting tradition from Hongshan, certainly exists.

Yellow Emperor

Based on the prominence of the dragon in Hongshan jade works and the mention of two places in Northern Hebei, a couple hundred kilometers to the west of Hongshan, as Yellow Emperor's battlefields in Sima Qian's History, some archaeologists have suggested that Hongshan people were his tribe. My views are highly skeptical.

Frist, whether the Yellow Emperor was a real person or just a mythological figure is still unsettled. He does not appear in the Shang and Zhou records and ceremonial chants as part of these kingdoms' pantheon, and the Qin state (later to become the first centralized empire of China) did not have Yellow Emperor shrines till well into the Warring States era, while worshipping of the White Emperor, whose surname Ying 嬴 was said to have been awarded by Emperor Shun to the Qin clan near the end of the neolithic era, started centuries earlier, and both the Green Emperor 伏羲 and Red Emperor 炎帝 had a Qin state shrines earlier than Yellow.

Yet, Yellow Emperor is unique in that his existence as an neolithic era figure of worship has been confirmed by archaeological evidence, while others are only based on chronicles that may be subsequent hearsay or even fiction: Prince Wei of the Warring State Qi had a 3-legged cauldron 鼎 made for a state occasion

with an inscription that honors Yellow Emperor as founding ancester, confirming in bronze the quotation from a Spring-Autumn historian Zhan Qin that the Shun Tribe, from which King Wei was descended, worshiped Yellow Emperor. The quotation goes on to say that the Yu tribe also worshiped Yellow Emperor, so that the Xia Dynasty founded by Yu would have the Yellow Emperor cult as its state ritual. Even more intriguing is that, the story about him ending his reign by riding to heaven on a dragon, with the 3-leg cauldron being featured in the story as having been used in the pre-ascent ceremony, has parallel versions among a number of East Asian ethnic groups like Koreans, Manchus and Mongols.

While Yellow Emperor's existence as an ancient figure of worship goes back 4000 years minimum, at least among some venerable tribes of East Asia, his existence as a real person remains unproven, and in fact the very name 黄帝 is problematic: in Shang script they were written as follows:

both representing bundles of straw bound up to resemble human figures, 黄 for shooting practice, which explains the arrow sign on top; it later became the ideogram for colour yellow because the targets were so painted; and 帝 was used to represent divine figures in worship, with all past Shang emperors being given names 帝so-and-so in the oracle bones. Further, some other written versions of 黄 has the grass sign on top instead of the arrow

so that the ideogram's meaning could have been bundled straw figures generally, whether or not used for target practice. In other words, the expression Yellow Emperor could be a generic term and not mean a specific person.

Taking a bit of digression, there is another ideogram for emperor 皇，which has the same pronunciation as 黄 (another possible illustration of 黄 being a generic term, whose sound was "borrowed" when an alternative ideogram came along) but whose appearance shows a very different background

It is king 王 wearing a feather crown,

which we saw in the Related Cultures, Liangzhu section.

Bird worship usually associates with hunting using arrows, which require feathers to stabilize their flight (something thought to come from bird ancestral blessing). In contrast, bundled hay figures are associated with agricultural tribes, who believed the grain god resides in the field and will be caught in the last bunch of crop harvested, so that the stalks were bound together to make a corn king idol, worshiped in harvest celebrations, and burnt during the final ceromony, a practice still followed in some parts of Europe, in particular Cornwall, England, in what is called the Crying the Neck ceremony. And in some parts of China, the following depicted ceremony is

still practised, with wine poured on a straw idol (the fibres absorbing wine from new harvest grain representing divine drinking) and the name of the ceremony 包茅缩酒 is indicated in Zhou history as a regular event, requiring tributary submission of divne grass from the Chu state, whose failure to keep up the practice was used as the excuse for a military campaign against it, by a group of states led by the Lord Lieutenant, Duke of Qi.

Thus, the two ideograms for emperor 皇 and 帝 represent two cultural traditions from hunting and farming tribes that contributed to Chinese history, with 黄 adding to the agricultural faction, while 黄帝 could be just a generic term for straw bound idols, later becoming attached to a particular figure when tribes worshiping it became dominant.

Cauldron, Silk and Wine

As an archaeological type, the three legged cauldron first appeared in pottery around five thousand years ago in the Shandong region, whereas no pottery cauldron has been

found in the Hongshan area throughout the neolithic era. The cauldron subsequently appeared in large numbers and varieties as Shang and Zhou artifacts, but in bronze, often with the taotie figure

Above: Pottery ding from Shang- dong area

Right: White pottery ding from Guang- dong area

Below: Bronze ding from Zhou era, now in Japan

A second type of artifacts absent in Hongshan is wine vessels. On the home page a wine cup from the Shangdong area was shown. Below are wine flasks from the same region/era

Above: the three hollow- legged vessel, in structure probably based on the merging of three pointy tipped bottles of Yangshao

Right: pig shaped vessel

Below: two vessels, from different regions and slightly different time periods

Another object frequently mentioned in connection with Yellow Emperor was silk: he formed alliance by marriage with silk-weaving tribes and received their support in his battles of conquest. Here Hongshan does have some claim of familiarity

Above: spinning wheels from elsewhere, next to Hongshan jade bi

Left: vague presentation of silkworm pupa

Below: slightly more recognizable item

However, no silk material or weaving tools have been found at Hongshan, and given the colder climate of the Manchurian area, it is unlikely that mulberry trees grew there in sufficient abundance to support a silk industry。

The cauldron, wine vessels and silk are all significant items of ancient Chinese culture, used in important worship rituals and state occasions. In particular, up to the western Han period, barons were required to present silk and jade to their overlords at the start of formal audience sessions, as the sign of feudal submission, and wine, jade and silk were presented as offerings to gods even up to modern times.

The absence of activities relating to the three types of objects, cauldron, wine and silk, can only indicate that Hongshan culture fed into subsequent Chinese cultural development in only very limited ways. The reason remains a mystery.