Women of her era did not have personal names recorded ; instead, Jiang is her clan name. The Jiang clan are possibly related to the Qiang people, a group believed to have been Tibeto-Burman in origin. However, the American scholar Christopher I. Beckwith has recently proposed that they were of Indo-European origins instead. Based on this assumption, Beckwith suggests that Jiang Yuan belonged to a clan of Indo-European origin. Yuan does not seem to be a lineage name: instead, it seems to be a title signifying "origin" or "source", in reference to her role as the mother of the royal Ji family of the Zhou dynasty.
Mythological biography
Jiang Yuan was the mother of Qi, credited in Chinese mythology with founding the Ji clan who went on to establish the Zhou dynasty. She was said historically to have been a consort of Emperor Ku. In mythology, she gave virgin birth to a miracle child. In some versions such as that found in the Zhou hymn "" credit Qi with a miraculous birth after Jiang Yuan stepped into a footprint or toeprint left by the supreme deityShangdi. The hymn records her as attempting to abandon him three times. According to mythology, the baby Houji was guarded in the street by livestock and fed by birds. Houji then introduced the cultivation of millet and other agricultural improvements and as the Lord of Millet set up the founding of the Zhou dynasty. Thus, the woman who gave birth to a child not sired by a husband mythologically became the ultimatehuman ancestor of the series of emperors known as the Zhou dynasty, the era when Chinese history as it is known truly commenced.
History
In Sima Qian's rationalistic account in the Records of the Grand Historian, Jiang Yuan is simply the first consort of Emperor Ku and Qi is one of his children. However, in his account, he credits the success of Zhou as being due primarily to the two women Jiang Yuan and Tai Ren. It is possible he meant this to credit the virtue and success of their children, but it is also possible that they represented important marriage alliances, or matriarchal culture. The Jiang were closely involved with the Ji before and after their rise to empire.
