Who put forward the five elements?

The Five Elements originated in the late Warring States period, and its founder was Zou Yan.

With the help of the long-standing fragmentary five elements thought, Zou Yan created a set of neat five elements theory to explain "Fu Ying in past dynasties and its proper governance". Zou Yan believes that the five elements of "earth, wood, gold, fire and water" are transferred according to the principle of mutual generation and mutual resistance, which corresponds to the change of dynasties in the world. The rise of the new dynasty must be due to the decline of the morality of the previous dynasty, and the morality on which the new dynasty depends must be invincible by the previous dynasty. This requires that people who want to be the emperor in the future must match their five virtues in order to truly express their destiny. Zou Yan's theory of "five virtues" was applied to Qin Shihuang. According to the theory of "five virtues", the Qin Dynasty defined water virtue as black to show that the Qin Dynasty was superior to the Zhou Dynasty in fire virtue. The ancient history system recorded in The Book of Songs is obviously different from the theory of five virtues.

The world classics changed the order of the five virtues to "wood, fire, earth, gold and water" (this is from Dong Zhongshu's five-element order); The second is to stretch the dynasty twice. Originally, Zou Yanshi's ancient history system was: Heaven and Earth were not born-Heaven and Earth judged-Huangdi-Xia-Shang and Zhou Dynasties. By the Qin Dynasty, he had just completed the Five Virtues. Huang San, Five Emperors, Shennong and Fuxi. They were all added to the ancient history system recorded in the Book of Songs before the summer, and it was the third time in the Zhou Dynasty. Because the ancient history system in the Book of Songs is the most complete, it has a great influence on later generations and has become orthodox and authoritative.