China's Divine Farmer supposedly tasted every plant, and found tea by accident
Shennong, the mythical Divine Farmer, is said to have had a transparent body so he could watch each herb act on his own organs. Legend credits him with swallowing seventy poisons in a day, discovering tea when leaves drifted into his boiling pot, and dying from one yellow flower too many.
Shennong was a legendary ruler, known as the Yan Emperor, and a deity of Chinese folk religion, sometimes numbered among the Three Sovereigns of prehistory. His mother is said to have conceived him by inhaling a dragon's breath; he was born with an ox's head, talked within three days and grew over eight feet tall. Stories cast him as a relative or even the father of the Yellow Emperor and as an ancestor of the Chinese people.
His list of supposed inventions is enormous: the hoe and plough, wells and irrigation, markets and money, the 24 solar terms of the calendar, even preserving seed grain with boiled horse urine to keep pests away. The Huainanzi says people were sickly and starving until he researched farming by tasting hundreds of plants. In the Hundred Schools era he was imagined as a culture hero with an extraordinary gut; by the third century BCE, amid war between kingdoms, he became the ideal ruler who governed without ministers, laws or punishments.
Tradition dates his discovery of tea to around 2437 BC, when leaves from burning twigs floated into his cauldron, and holds that it counteracted some seventy poisonous herbs. The pharmacopoeia bearing his name, the Divine Farmer's Herb-Root Classic, lists 365 remedies from minerals, plants and animals and counts as the earliest Chinese pharmacopoeia, though research suggests it was compiled from oral tradition around 200 to 250 AD. Some myths say he died when a poisonous weed, perhaps heartbreak grass, killed him before he could drink his antidote.
Worshipped as the Medicine King, he watches over farmers and rice merchants as well as those who practise traditional Chinese medicine. Custom forbids offering him oxen; pigs and sheep are acceptable, and his birthday falls on the 26th day of the fourth lunar month. Historians stress there is no firm record for this era: writing on durable material only appears in China in the thirteenth century BC.
Source: Shennong
