Yao

Yao a legendary ancient Chinese ruler, one of the Five Emperors, celebrated in Confucian tradition as the model of the wise and virtuous king. He is remembered above all for choosing a successor on the ground of merit rather than birth and for handing the throne to Shun, an act that became the classic example of rule by virtue.

The Sage King of Antiquity

Yao belongs to the legendary age of the Five Emperors, the sage rulers who precede the first dynasties in traditional Chinese history. His reign is placed in the third millennium before the common era, and although the sources are late and mythical, he became one of the most revered figures of Chinese moral and political thought. Confucius and Mencius looked back to him as the embodiment of ideal kingship.

Tradition describes him as a ruler of great humility and self-restraint, who wore coarse clothes and lived simply while he laboured for the welfare of his people. He is said to have ruled for many decades and to have grown old in the service of the realm. His name became synonymous with benevolence, and later writers appealed to his example whenever they wished to portray the golden age of good government.

He is portrayed as a monarch who surrounded himself with able ministers and who sought out the counsels of the wise. Among his ministers were the astronomers Xi and He, charged with observing the heavens and regulating the calendar, and the flood engineer Gun, whose efforts to control the waters were later continued by his son Yu. The picture is of a ruler who governs through the talents of others.

Astronomy, the Calendar and Agriculture

Yao is especially associated with the regulation of the calendar. The classic of history records that he commanded his astronomers to observe the sun, moon and stars in order to determine the seasons and to fix the times of sowing and harvest. He is said to have established the four seasons and to have taught the people to follow the rhythms of the year.

The observation of the heavens was not idle curiosity but a matter of government. A correct calendar told farmers when to plant and when to reap, and it ordered the festivals and the sacrifices by which the community lived. In this way astronomy, agriculture and ritual were bound together, and the ruler who ordered time was also the guarantor of the people's food.

Yao is said to have divided the realm and to have sent officers to the four quarters to observe the rising and setting of the sun and the position of the stars, thereby bringing the whole land into a single measure of time. This legend made him the founder of the Chinese calendrical tradition and the patron of the disciplined observation of nature.

The Abdication to Shun

The most famous episode of Yao's life is his choice of a successor. As he grew old his ministers proposed his own son Dan Zhu, but Yao judged the young man unfit and refused. He sought instead a man of genuine virtue, and the choice fell upon Shun, a humble farmer renowned for his filial piety and for his patience under the cruelty of his family.

Yao tested Shun before entrusting him with rule. He gave him his two daughters in marriage and set him a series of difficult tasks, and Shun proved himself in every one. Convinced at last of his merit, Yao raised him to the throne and abdicated in his favour, setting aside the claims of birth in favour of those of character. The act was remembered as the abdication of virtue, one of the most admired events in Chinese tradition.

This story became a central argument in Chinese political thought. Confucians cited it to show that the throne should go to the worthiest and that the ruler holds his office in trust for the people. The tradition of the sage emperors yielding to one another stood as the ideal against which later hereditary dynasties were judged.

The Daoist and Confucian Ideal

For the Confucian school Yao was the pattern of the benevolent king, the sovereign who rules by moral example rather than by force. Confucius praised him in the Analects, and Mencius and Xunzi returned repeatedly to his reign as the model of good government. He was invoked by ministers who wished to remind emperors of the duties of their office and by scholars who sought to measure the present against the past.

The Daoist tradition drew a different lesson from his legend. In the Daodejing and in the writings of Zhuangzi the age of Yao and Shun is sometimes praised as one of simplicity and naturalness, but sometimes also criticised as the beginning of artifice and moral effort. Zhuangzi tells stories in which the sage kings are gently mocked, and the contrast between the natural way and the busy virtue of rulers became a theme of Daoist reflection.

Yao thus stands at the meeting point of the great traditions of Chinese thought. For one he is the ideal of moral government, for another a symbol of the tension between natural simplicity and deliberate virtue, and for both a figure of the golden age when rulers served the people rather than themselves.

Worship, Memory and Legacy

Yao was honoured with temples and with rites, and his cult was maintained in various parts of China. He appears in the classical histories and in the poetry of later centuries as the very type of the good king, and his name was used to praise living rulers or to reproach them by comparison. The phrase the age of Yao and Shun became a byword for peace and plenty.

The abdication story also shaped the Chinese conception of legitimacy. It furnished a precedent for the view that a ruler who has lost virtue has forfeited the mandate of heaven, and it was invoked in debates over succession and reform throughout the imperial age. Ambitious ministers and rebel leaders alike claimed to be following the example of Yao in yielding the throne to merit.

Yao remains a central figure of the traditional account of Chinese origins. Whether or not a historical ruler ever bore the name, the legend of the sage king who ordered the calendar, cared for his people and gave up his throne to the worthier man became a permanent part of Chinese moral and political culture.

See also

• Five Emperors
• Shun
• Mandate of Heaven
• Classic of History