The legendary Chinese ruler credited with inventing agriculture and medicine is Shennong.
Shennong means “Divine Farmer” or “Divine Husbandman.” He is a culture hero and ancestral deity who is sometimes counted among the Three Sovereigns, a group of primordial rulers in Chinese tradition. His agricultural role includes teaching people how to cultivate crops and use tools such as the plow and hoe, making settled food production possible in mythic prehistory.
Shennong is equally famous for testing plants. Legend says he tasted hundreds of herbs, including poisonous ones, to learn their effects and identify their medicinal value. Later tradition attributes the Divine Farmer’s Herb-Root Classic to him, although the surviving pharmacological text was compiled much later, near the end of the Western Han period. The work lists 365 medicines derived from plants, animals, and minerals.
The title “ruler” does not mean Shennong is treated as a securely documented historical emperor. He belongs primarily to mythology, folk religion, and the legendary prehistory of China. Huangdi is another member of the culture-hero tradition, Fuxi is associated with inventions such as the trigrams, and Yao is remembered as a virtuous sage ruler, but Shennong is the figure tied specifically to farming and herbal medicine.