The Fall of Shang

The Fall of the Shang

In China, between 1073 and 1040 BC, the Shang Dynasty falls to the virtue of the Zhou

FARTHER TO THE EAST, Wu Ting had passed his throne, after a sixty-year reign, to his son. The Shang kingship went on, for some years, from brother to brother or father to son, more or less in peace. The center of the Shang empire was the Yellow river, and the Shang capital remained at Yin.

By the time that the Mesopotamian kingdoms had begun to crumble, though, the kingship of China was also in crisis.

It was a very different crisis than any faced by Nebuchadnezzar I or Tiglath-Pileser. The Shang kings and their people were not dealing with the invasions of unknown foreign tribes; the Shang king’s enemies were the cousins of his own people.

Just west of the Shang lands, the Zhou tribe lay across the Wei river valley. They were not exactly subjects of the Shang king, although their chief—the “Lord of the West”—paid lip service to the authority of the crown. Their land, after all, lay almost four hundred miles distant from the capital. Oracle bones travelled back and forth between the Lord of the West and the Shang palace, keeping a path of shared language and customs open.¹ But the Zhou noblemen were loyal first to their own lord, not to the distant Shang monarch. When rebellion broke out, they looked to the Lord of the West for their orders.

THE ANCIENT CHRONICLES make it very clear that the Shang kings brought this rebellion on themselves. They abandoned wisdom, and this wisdom (not military might, as in the west) was the foundation of their power.

The emperor Wu-yi, the fifth ruler to follow Wu Ting, showed the first signs of decay. His offenses, according to Sima Qian, were primarily against the gods: he made idols, “called them heavenly gods,” and played lots with them. When he won, he mocked the idols as lousy gamblers.

42.1 Shang and Zhou

This was a serious breach of his royal responsibilities. With more and more weight being placed on the oracle-bone ritual, the royal court had become the center of divine revelations from the ancestors to the living. All queries to the ancestors were carried out in the name of the king; he was the conduit for the messages from the divine powers. For him to mock those powers was appalling.

The punishment fit the crime; Wu-yi was struck by lightning while out hunting. He was succeeded by his son and then his grandson, under whom (according to Sima Qian) the country declined still more. Then his great-grandson Chou inherited, and the Shang authority crashed.

Chou was gifted with natural graces—Sima Qian praises him for his strength, intelligence, articulateness, and perception—but he used them all for ill. “His knowledge was sufficient to resist remonstrance,” Qian writes, “and his speech was adequate to cover up his wrongdoing…. He considered everyone beneath him. He was fond of wine, licentious in pleasure, and doted on women.” Chou’s love of wine and pleasure led him to raise taxes so that he could stock his hunting forests and pleasure parks with game; his love of women put him under the spell of a cruel and domineering courtesan named Ta Chi, whose words became the only ones he would hear. His love of spectacle grew so great that he built a pool and filled it with wine, hung meat like a forest around it, and “made naked men and women chase one another” around the pool and through the forest.²

Weird frivolity gave way to serious tyranny. Noblemen suspected of disloyalty were forced to lie on a red-hot rack. Chou had one court official flayed, and another carved up into meat strips and hung to dry. When his uncle remonstrated with him, he remarked that since the heart of a wise man had seven chambers, he would need to examine his uncle’s heart with his own eyes before heeding his advice—and then carried out the threat. His cruelty worsened until “it knew no end.” The noblemen—the “families of the hundred cognomens,” those with honorable names—were “filled with resentment and hatred.”

Finally he overstepped himself. The Zhou chief Wen, the Lord of the West, was in the capital on business, and Chou had set his spies to follow him. When the spies reported that the Lord of the West had “sighed in secret” over the behavior of the king, Chou had Wen arrested and thrown into jail.¹⁰¹

Hearing that their lord was in jail, the Zhou tribes brought Chou the kind of tribute likely to soften his heart: fine objects and beautiful women. Chou, properly touched, set Wen free. But the Lord of the West refused to return home without making some effort to shield Chou’s oppressed subjects from the king’s brutality. He told Chou that he had a proposition for him; if he would promise to stop using his red-hot rack, Wen would gift him with the fertile Zhou land around the Lo river, which flowed south to join the Wei. Chou, who had done very well out of Wen’s imprisonment, agreed to the deal, took ownership of the land, and sent Wen home.

This turned out to be a mistake. Wen was much loved in his own lands as a warrior-king who was both good (as shown by his willingness to sacrifice his own lands for the people) and mighty (the later Chinese historian and philosopher Mengzi mentions, offhand, that he was ten feet tall).³ Back in the west, he began quietly to round up opposition to the king. “Many of the feudal lords rebelled,” Qian writes, “and turned to the Lord of the West.” They were joined by the sages of the court who read the oracle bones and divine prophecies; they rose up en masse with all their instruments of ritual, left the court, and marched west.

Wen, by this time an elderly man (a hundred years old, according to Mengzi), died before he could lead his followers into the Shang capital.⁴ But his son Wu took up his banner. Eight hundred of the feudal lords lined up behind him, each with their own soldiers. The Zhou army of fifty thousand marched towards the Shang palace at Yin. And Chou ordered his own troops out to meet the attack: seven hundred thousand strong.

The two armies met about twenty miles outside Yin, at the Battle of Muye. By any measure, the imperial army should have crushed the tiny rebel force, but the Zhou had two advantages. The first was tactical: Zhou noblemen had provided three hundred war-chariots, while the royal army had none at all.⁵ But it was the second advantage—the Zhou possession of the moral high ground—that turned the battle against the king. The king’s men, disgusted with their leader’s cruelty, were ripe for defection. As the Zhou line thundered towards them, the Shang soldiers in the front line reversed the direction of their attack and drove the men behind them back, turning the entire army around and throwing it into flight.⁶

Seeing the inevitable defeat looming, Chou retreated to his palace, where he donned jade armor in preparation for a last stand. But the invading Zhou forces burned the palace down around his ears. He died in flames, a poetic end for the man who had used fire to torture and kill.

There is in this story a strong whiff of discomfort with Wen’s revolt. The ancient historians do not celebrate the overthrow of the tyrant, and Wu makes no boast of reigning from horizon to horizon, or of piling enemy heads by the gates. He is praised not for his skill at fighting, but for his restoration of proper order.

The rebellion of the Zhou is not exactly the disobedience of a governed people. Even before the revolt, the Shang king had an ambiguous power over the Zhou. Wen was a king in his own right, but the Shang king was able to throw him in jail and force a ransom. On the other hand, when Wen offered Chou a gift of land, the king recognized it happily as a present, rather than pointing out indignantly that he already ruled it.

But the ancient historians still find themselves forced to justify the Zhou defiance. The Zhou and Shang were sibling cultures, and battles between them were as disconcerting as the hostility between Set and Osiris in the early years of Egypt. It is positively necessary that the first Zhou king be, not a lawless subject, but rather a virtuous man who rises up to overthrow vice and begin the cycle again. For this reason, the Zhou rule is dated not from the victorious Wu, but from his father, who was unjustly imprisoned and who willingly sacrificed land for the good of his people. He, not his warlike son, is considered to be the first Zhou king. The Shang rule is said to have ended not at the gates of the burning palace, but back when the noblemen and the oracle-readers gathered under the leadership of the Lord of the West. And the Zhou takeover was not the invasion of an enemy people. Chou’s own lawlessness was the cause of his death. For the Chinese chroniclers, rot always came from within.

Virtue notwithstanding, Wu of the Zhou claimed his new title by thrusting a pike into Chou’s singed head and staking it out in front of Yin’s gates for all to see. The old order had perished in fire; the new order had arrived.