King Wu of Zhou

King Wu of Zhou the first king of the Zhou dynasty of ancient China, who overthrew the last king of the Shang and founded a dynasty that was to rule for centuries. He is remembered as the warrior-king who completed the work prepared by his father King Wen and who established the doctrine of the mandate of heaven as the ground of legitimate rule.

The Son of King Wen

King Wu, whose personal name was Ji Fa, was the son of King Wen of Zhou, the ruler whose virtue had made the Zhou the leading power of the western plain. He inherited his father's position and his father's cause, and the tradition presents him as the instrument by which the long-prepared change of dynasty was accomplished. His name means the martial king, and he is remembered as the founder of the Zhou.

According to the classical accounts King Wu was assisted by able ministers, chief among them his brother the Duke of Zhou and the counsellors who had served his father. Together they mobilised the forces of the Zhou and their allies and prepared for the decisive confrontation with the Shang. The tradition emphasises that the enterprise was undertaken with care and with the full support of the other lords.

King Wu is said to have honoured his father's memory and to have continued his policies, and the classical texts present the two kings as a single work, the father preparing and the son completing. This pairing of the wise founder and the victorious successor became a favourite pattern of Chinese dynastic history.

The Battle of Muye

The decisive event of King Wu's reign was the battle of Muye, fought in about the eleventh century before the common era against the last Shang king, Di Xin. According to the traditional accounts the Shang king's army was vastly larger, but it was composed in part of unwilling troops and captives who turned against their master, and the Zhou forces won a decisive victory.

Before the battle King Wu is said to have addressed his army, denouncing the crimes of the Shang king and declaring that the Zhou acted under the command of heaven. This speech, preserved in the classic of history, is one of the founding statements of the doctrine of the mandate of heaven: that a ruler who oppresses his people loses the right to rule and may be removed.

After the victory the last Shang king is said to have taken his own life, and the dynasty that had ruled for centuries came to an end. King Wu entered the capital and took measures to restore order, to honour the fallen and to secure the submission of the remaining Shang forces and their allies. The conquest was rapid, but the settlement of the realm required years of work.

The Founding of the Zhou Order

After the conquest King Wu established the new dynasty and set about the government of the realm. He is said to have distributed lands and titles among his kinsmen, his ministers and the loyal lords, creating the system of fiefs that was to shape Zhou society. The old Shang territories were entrusted partly to members of the royal family and partly to cooperative members of the fallen house.

The regime that King Wu founded rested on a vision of government by ritual and by moral authority. The Zhou developed the institutions of the court, the ceremonies of sacrifice and the codes of conduct that were later celebrated as the essence of Chinese civilisation. The idea that the king rules by virtue and governs through the harmony of rite and music became a central tenet of the dynasty.

King Wu died relatively young, and the work of consolidating the new order fell to his brother the Duke of Zhou, who acted as regent for the young heir and who is remembered as the great statesman of the dynasty. The partnership of King Wu, the conqueror, and the Duke of Zhou, the lawgiver, gave the Zhou its founding pair of heroes.

The Mandate of Heaven

The most enduring legacy of King Wu's conquest was the doctrine of the mandate of heaven. The Zhou argued that the Shang had forfeited the right to rule through the tyranny of their last king, and that heaven had transferred its mandate to the virtuous house of Zhou. The argument justified the conquest and bound the new dynasty to a standard of conduct beyond its own will.

This doctrine shaped the whole subsequent history of Chinese political thought. It held that the right to rule depends on the welfare of the people and on the moral character of the ruler, and that a dynasty which loses virtue loses its mandate. Floods, famines, rebellions and natural disasters were read as signs that the mandate was in question, and the change of dynasties was explained as its transfer.

The claim also gave later rebels and founders a language in which to justify their acts. Every dynasty that succeeded the Zhou invoked the precedent of King Wu, arguing that it too had been called to remove a tyrant and to restore good government. The mandate of heaven thus became one of the most powerful and durable political ideas in world history.

Influence and Legacy

King Wu was honoured as the founder of the Zhou dynasty and as one of the great kings of Chinese antiquity. He was worshipped with the ancestral sacrifices of the royal house, and Confucian writers praised him as the ruler who completed the work of his father and established a dynasty on the foundation of virtue. His name remained associated with righteous warfare.

The Zhou dynasty that he founded was one of the longest lived and most influential in Chinese history. It gave China the doctrine of the mandate of heaven, the ritual and social order described in the classical texts, and the intellectual ferment of the Spring and Autumn and Warring States periods, in which Confucius and the other philosophers taught. The age of the Zhou became the classical age of Chinese culture.

King Wu is remembered, finally, as the king who acted when his father had prepared and who dared to take up arms against a tyrant. In the traditional account of Chinese history he stands among the founders of the dynasties, the warrior counterpart to King Wen's sage, and the ruler with whose victory the long ascendancy of the Zhou began.

See also

• Zhou dynasty
• King Wen of Zhou
• Battle of Muye
• Mandate of Heaven