Jiang Yuan

Jiang Yuan (Chinese: 姜嫄) is an important figure in Chinese mythology and history. She is recorded as having lived during the ancient times of Chinese culture and history. Jiang Yuan was the mother of Houji, who is a culture hero and revered as the God of Millet.

Women of her era did not have personal names recorded (and may not even have possessed them); instead, Jiang is her clan name. The Jiang clan are possibly related to the Qiang people, a groupbelieved to have been Tibeto-Burman in origin. However, the American scholar Christopher I. Beckwith has recently proposed that they were of Indo-European origins instead. Based on this assumption Beckwith suggests that Jiang Yuan belonged to a clan of Indo-European origin. Yuan does not seem to be a lineage name: instead, it seems to be a title signifying "origin" or "source", in reference to her role as the mother of the royal Ji family of the Zhou dynasty.

Jiang Yuan was the mother of Qi (also known as Houji), credited in Chinese mythology with founding the Ji clan who went on to establish the Zhou dynasty. She was said historically to have been a consort of Emperor Ku. In mythology she gave virgin birth to a miracle child. In some versions – such as that found in the Zhou hymn "Birth of Our People" – credit Qi with a miraculous birth after Jiang Yuan stepped into a footprint or toeprint left by the supreme deity Shangdi. The hymn records her as attempting to abandon him three times (his name Qi means "the Abandoned One"). According to the mythology, Houji, the Abandoned One, as a baby was guarded in the street by livestock and fed by birds. Houji then (still little grown) introduced the cultivation of millet (ji) and other agricultural improvements, and as the Lord of Millet set up the founding of the Zhou dynasty. Thus, the woman who gave birth to a child not sired by a husband -- Jiang Yuan -- mythologically became the ultimate human ancestor of the series of emperors known as the Zhou dynasty, the era when Chinese history as it is known truly commenced (Ferguson 1928, 6).

In Sima Qian's rationalistic account in the Records of the Grand Historian, Jiang Yuan is simply the first consort of Emperor Ku and Qi is one of his children. However, in his account, he credits the success of Zhou as being due primarily to the two women Jiang Yuan and Tai Ren. It is possible he meant this to credit the virtue and success of their children; but it is also possible that they represented important marriage alliances, or matriarchal culture. The Jiang were closely involved with the Ji before and after their rise to empire (Tai Ren of Zhi was the wife of a male descendant of Jiang Yuan and a leader of the Ji family/Zhou dynasty, who also had an important connection to the Shang dynasty).

In Chinese popular religion, Jiang Yuan is worshiped as a goddess.

• Beckwith, Christopher I. (16 March 2009). Empires of the Silk Road: A History of Central Eurasia from the Bronze Age to the Present. Princeton University Press. ISBN 1400829941. Retrieved 30 December 2014.
• Kleeman, Terry F. (1998). Great Perfection: Religion and Ethnicity in a Chinese Millennial Kingdom. University of Hawaii Press. ISBN 0824818008. Retrieved 31 December 2014.
• Ferguson, John C. 1928. "China" in Volume VIII of Mythology of All Races. Archeological Institute of America. <archive.org>
• Yang, Lihui & al. Handbook of Chinese Mythology. Oxford Univ. Press (New York), 2005. ISBN 978-0-19-533263-6.