King Wu

The conquest of the Shang dynasty at the battle of Muye, traditionally dated to 1046 BC, made King Wu of Zhou (d. c. 1043 BC) the first king of the dynasty that would give its name to nearly eight centuries of Chinese history. Named Fa, he was the son of Chang, the Zhou leader posthumously honored as King Wen, who had built the western confederation against the Shang but died before leading it east. As with all figures of this period, the sources — Western Zhou bronze inscriptions, the Book of Documents, and much later histories — combine near-contemporary witness with layers of tradition, and details of his career are correspondingly uncertain.

The received narrative relates that Fa assembled the Zhou and their allies, crossed the Yellow River at Mengjin, and met the army of the last Shang king, Di Xin, on the plain of Muye near the Shang capital. The Shang force, said in later accounts to have been swollen with conscripts and captives who turned on their masters, collapsed; Di Xin died in the burning of his palace, and the Zhou assumed supremacy over the Central Plains. The Li gui, a bronze vessel cast within days of the battle by a participant, provides rare contemporary confirmation that the victory occurred on a jiazi day, anchoring the event in the inscriptional record even as its precise year remains debated.

As king, Wu faced the problem of governing the conquered east from his western base. He is recorded as enfeoffing relatives and allied lords over strategic territories and, notably, leaving Di Xin's son Wu Geng in place over the Shang heartland under the watch of his own brothers — an arrangement that failed after his death, when those brothers joined Wu Geng in revolt.

King Wu died only a few years after the conquest, traditionally around 1043 BC, leaving a young heir, King Cheng. The regency of his brother Dan, the Duke of Zhou, suppressed the eastern rebellion and secured the dynasty. In later political thought King Wu became the paired complement of his father: where King Wen exemplified virtue accumulating the Mandate of Heaven, King Wu exemplified its legitimate execution by force against a corrupt ruler.