The Book of Songs Truong Lu Gong records: "When Yu was in charge of water control, Hou Ji began to broadcast Baigu." Hou Ji is another person who leads agricultural production after Yu's flood control.
It is said that many years after Shennong, there was a woman named Jiang Yuan. According to legend, she is the daughter of Grandmother of Shennong, the great-grandson of Huangdi and the first wife of Zhou clan leader. Jiang Yuan really wants to have a child, but she can't get pregnant anyway. Therefore, she is very upset.
One day, Jiang Yuan went out to play. On his way home, he found a giant's footprint on the wetland. She was very surprised and interesting, so she put her feet on the giant's steps.
Who knows that as soon as she stepped into the giant's big toe, she felt a shock. So she got pregnant.
Time passed quickly. When the baby was born, Jiang Yuan gave birth to a little boy. According to historical records, it is "the fetus is like an egg", that is, it is born with cells.
In matriarchal society, marriage has developed to the stage of prohibiting intermarriage. In other words, it is legal for Jiang Yuan to marry a man of another totem clan.
Because Jiang Yuan's child had no father and was "as vivid as an egg", people around him felt that the child was unlucky, so they forcibly snatched the boy from Jiang Yuan's arms and threw it in the ground, thinking that the child would starve to death.
Animals passing by in the field protect the little boy, and some females feed him. People saw that the child was not dead and prepared to abandon him in the virgin forest.
Just then, someone went to the forest to cut down trees and saved the child. Finally, people simply abandon their children on the ice. But before people went far, all the birds in the sky flew down and blocked the boy's cold with their wings.
At this time, people finally realized that the little boy was not an ordinary person, so they took him back and continued to let his mother raise him.
Because the boy was abandoned many times, the boy's mother Jiang Yuan named him "abandoned".
According to the Book of Songs Daya Sheng Min, when Hou Ji was a child, he knew how to stand on his own feet, how to weed, how to plant crops such as soybeans, hemp, barley and melon, and the crops he planted were all good varieties with full and huge seeds. He also talked about how Hou Ji harvested, threshed and processed mature grain and put it in sacrificial vessels. Ancestors matched heaven, and delicious cooked food was soon enjoyed by the Jade Emperor.
The above contents reflect the crop structure and techniques from planting to harvesting in the Western Zhou Dynasty.
In connection with the above, because Hou Ji's mother gave birth to Hou Ji, this part of The Book of Songs describes the agricultural origin, agricultural structure and operation technology of Zhou nationality in the form of a hymn, which is very concise and vivid. This is an extremely precious agricultural historical document.