King Wen of Zhou

King Wen laid the ground for the conquest of the Shang and did not live to carry it out, which is exactly why later Chinese political writing keeps returning to him. He was Count of the West, ruler of the Zhou state in the Wei valley on the western edge of the Shang world, and a nominal vassal of the last Shang king, Di Xin. Tradition holds that Di Xin imprisoned him for several years at Youli, and that his subjects ransomed him with horses and treasure; the Zhou then expanded steadily westward and northward, absorbing neighbouring states and moving the capital to Feng, until they controlled most of the Shang periphery without attacking the centre. He is said to have found his chief adviser, Jiang Ziya, fishing on a riverbank. He died before the campaign, and his son King Wu destroyed the Shang at Muye. The Zhou justified the conquest by the Mandate of Heaven - the doctrine that rule is granted for virtue and withdrawn for its absence - and Wen is the figure in whom that virtue is located, so that the argument for overthrowing a dynasty rests on a man who never overthrew one. Confucius took him as a model of the ruler who governs by example. He is traditionally credited with arranging the sixty-four hexagrams of the Book of Changes and writing their judgements while imprisoned, an attribution modern scholarship does not accept. Cao Cao invoked him in declining the imperial title a thousand years later. The name Wen means cultured or civil, and it was given to him after his death by the dynasty he had not lived to found. His temple name and his pairing with his son Wu, the martial one, set a template Chinese dynasties reused for two thousand years. Excavated oracle bones from Zhouyuan have since confirmed that the Zhou were performing their own divinations during his lifetime, which is evidence of a state acting independently well before the conquest.

• Lived: 1152 BCE – 1050 BCE
• Nationality: Chinese
• Roles: ruler