King Wen of Zhou was count of Zhou during the late Shang dynasty in ancient China. Although it was his son Wu who conquered the Shang following the Battle of Muye, Count Wen was posthumously honored as the founder of the Zhou dynasty and titled King. Many of the hymns of the Classic of Poetry are praises to the legacy of King Wen. Some consider him the first epic hero of Chinese history.
Biography
Born Ji Chang, Wen was the son of Tairen and Ji Jili, the count of a small state along the Wei River in present-day Shaanxi. Jili was betrayed and executed by the Shang king Wen Ding in the late 12th century BC, leaving the young Chang as the count of Zhou. Wen married Taisi and fathered ten sons and one daughter by her, plus at least another eight sons with concubines. At one point, King Zhou of Shang, fearing Wen's growing power, imprisoned him in Youli after he was slandered by the Marquis of Chong. His eldest son, Bo Yikao, went to King Zhou to plead for his freedom, but was executed in a rage by lingchi and made into meat cakes which were fed to his father in Youli. However, many officials respected Wen for his honorable governance and gave King Zhou so many gifts including gold, horses, and women that he released Wen, and also bestowed upon him his personal weapons and invested him with the special rank of Count of the West. Wen offered a piece of his land in Western Luo to King Zhou, who in turn allowed Wen to make one last request. He requested that the Burning Pillar punishment be abolished, and so it was. Subsequently, upon returning home Wen secretly began to plot to overthrow King Zhou. In his first year as Count of the West, he settled a land dispute between the states of Yu and Rui, earning greater recognition among the nobles. It is by this point that some nobles began calling him "king". The following year, Wen found Jiang Ziya fishing in the Pan River and hired him as a military counselor. He also repelled an invasion of the Quanrong barbarians and occupied a portion of their land. The following year, he campaigned against Mixu, a state whose chief had been harassing the smaller states of Ruan and Gong, thus annexing the three of them. The following year, he attacked Li, a puppet of Shang, and the next year he attacked E, a rebel state opposed to Shang, conquering both. One year later he attacked Chong, home of Hu, Marquis of Chong, his arch-enemy, and defeated it, gaining access to the Ford of Meng through which he could cross his army to attack Shang. By then he had obtained about two thirds of the whole kingdom either as direct possessions or sworn allies. That same year he moved his capital city one hundred kilometers east from Mount Qi to Feng, placing the Shang under imminent threat. The following year, however, the Count of the West died before he could cross the Ford. It is worth-noting, nonetheless, that other sources suggest he died in battle during the Zhou campaign against the Yin-Shang. Four years after his death, his second son, known as King Wu, followed his footsteps and crushed the Shang at Muye, founding the Zhou dynasty. The name "Wen" means "the Cultured" or "the Civilizing" and was made into an official royal name by King Wu in honor of his father.
Legacy
Divination
Many of the older odes from the Classic of Poetry are hymns in praise of King Wen. King Wen is also credited with having stacked the eighttrigrams in their various permutations to create the sixty-four hexagrams of the I Ching. He is also said to have written the judgments which are appended to each hexagram. The most commonly used sequence of the 64 hexagrams is attributed to him and is usually referred to as the King Wen sequence.
Posthumous Honors
In 196 BC, Han Gaozu gave King Wen the title "Greatest of All Kings".
