Background & setting
Shennong, the Divine Farmer, personifies the beginnings of cultivation and knowledge of useful plants. The Huainanzi’s Xiu Wu chapter places his work in a world where people must learn how to feed themselves. His identification with Yandi developed across traditions.
The story
Shennong teaches people to sow grains and studies which ground is dry or wet, fertile or poor. He tastes plants and waters so that people can learn what to avoid and what to use. The text says that he encounters seventy poisons in one day, emphasizing the dangers borne by the first explorer of this knowledge.
Later tellings turn this short account into journeys through mountains, miraculous recoveries and sometimes a final fatal plant. Those details vary. The enduring connection is between farming and healing: knowledge of the living world is earned through effort and passed on for the benefit of others.
How to read it
This is a myth of patient inquiry and shared knowledge. The supernatural survival belongs to the story; it does not make tasting unknown plants a reliable way to identify them.
Where this telling comes from
Huainanzi, Xiu Wu, supplies the agricultural setting and the tasting of plants and waters.
- Huainanzi ↗
A Han philosophical compilation. See Lanming for Nüwa, Benjing for the archer Yi, Tianwen for Gonggong, and Lanming for the moon elixir.
An original introductory retelling · Sources consulted October 10, 2026.