龍師火帝
lóng shī huǒ dì
"Dragon Master and Fire Emperor"
We've seen so far that each four-character line often forms a couplet with another, and together they comment on the world in some way. The last couplet (lines 17-18) told us a little something about the natural world, and the one before that about human preferences with regards to food; with this one, we're entering mythological-historical territory again.
Here begins a longer description of the earliest days of mankind, as depicted through the Chinese lens. It runs several lines, so I'm questioning the value of breaking it (and similar future passages) into single lines. On the other hand, I'm not in a rush to get through this, nor am I prohibited from writing up summary posts of particular passages, which is what I think I'll do once I've done line-by-line readings of this section.
龍師, "dragon master," refers to 伏羲 Fu Xi, the legendary creator of the human race in Chinese mythology; according to my copy of the 千字文, he "designated his officials with the names of different colored dragons." 火帝, "fire emperor," refers to 神農 Shen Nong, the agricultural god and inventor of, among other things, acupuncture (but apparently not fire-making; that was 燧人氏 Suirenshi). Why is Shen Nong the fire emperor? Because the "first five emperors of the Legendary Period ... were each associated with one of the five elements (wood, fire, earth, metal, and water)."
You can read more in English about both of these figures on Wikipedia or elsewhere; if you want to read about them in Chinese, and in the context of the Thousand Character Classic, check out this blog. That's where I got my start, since my edition of the book is a bit thin on details. The blog, however, associated the Fire Emperor with Suirenshi, so I'm confused about the exact correspondences between one name and another.
While it's not obvious from this line, there's an unwritten grammatical element that connects it to the following lines, as we'll see shortly.
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