HUANGDI, the Yellow Emperor, is a pan-Chinese culture hero and the mythic first emperor of history. In order to avoid the very narrow connotations of the term emperor, the word di is often rendered lord, monarch, thearch, ancestor, or god. The complex mythology of Huangdi is roughly composed of three traditions that evolved during the first millennium BCE and that appear together in the first universal history of China, the Shiji (Records of the historian), in the second century BCE: Huangdi as celestial deity, as perfect sovereign, and as patron of the esoteric arts.

As the personification of the central part of heaven, surrounded by the four "emperors" of the four orients, Huangdi received a cult from feudal lords in the Zhou kingdom. After the unification of the empire by the Qin (221 BCE), the Han dynasty (206 BCE–220 CE) affirmed its heaven-ordained rule by unifying the cults to the...