The main content of Shen Nong’s Taste of Hundreds of Herbs is:

It is said that Emperor Yan Shennong’s whole body was transparent and he could see clearly the internal organs and blood circulation. He took advantage of this characteristic and worked tirelessly across mountains and ridges to collect medicines for the people and test their properties. He personally tasted hundreds of herbs and understood their medicinal properties before using them to treat people's illnesses. Once, he encountered seventy-two kinds of poisonous weeds in one day, and was poisoned under a tea tree. It was raining, and the water droplets on the tea leaves kept dripping into his mouth, slowly seeping into his organs and dissolving the poison.

Since then he discovered that tea can detoxify. One day, he tried to eat a kind of yellow-flowered grass in Nanyue Mountain, and his intestines were broken. It turned out that the grass was covered with small hard hooks, which could break the intestines and was highly toxic. People had no time to save him, and Shennong died. From then on, people called this grass Gelsemium spp. After Shennong died, people buried him in Lingxian County and respected him as the ancestor of the invention of medicine.

Spiritual value

Shen Nong tasted hundreds of herbs and used his own body as a test object to test the medicinal properties of tens of thousands of wild plants, and identified various Chinese herbal medicines with specific medicinal effects. And benefit the people around you.

In order to relieve the people of life, old age, illness and death, Shennong traveled through thorny jungles, climbed cliffs, and even died of poisonous weeds in the end. Yandi Shennong's selfless dedication spirit of sacrificing himself for the people has been spread in different periods of the Chinese nation. During the Spring and Autumn Period and the Warring States Period, the great thinker Confucius put forward the thought of "benevolent government and caring for the people", and Mencius put forward the thought of "the people are the most important, the country is the second most important, and the king is the least important".