Battle of Muye

At Muye, in what is now central Henan province, King Wu of Zhou defeated the army of Di Xin, the last king of the Shang dynasty, in about 1046 BC. The victory let the Zhou take the Shang capital at Yin and found the Zhou dynasty. In later tradition the battle became the classic example of the Mandate of Heaven, the doctrine used throughout Chinese history to justify one dynasty's overthrow of another.

By the twelfth century BC Shang influence reached west into the Wei River valley, home of the Zhou. The Zhou ruler, later known as King Wen, served as a vassal of the Shang and was given the title "Overlord of the West", guarding the Shang rear while Di Xin fought costly wars in the east. According to later accounts, Di Xin turned against his leading nobles, killing two of them and imprisoning Wen for a time. After his release, Wen began conquering states loyal to the Shang and built a new capital at Feng. He died, traditionally in 1050 BC, before the decisive attack, and his son King Wu, advised by the minister Jiang Ziya, waited for what he judged the right moment before leading a coalition against the Shang.

Almost everything known about the war comes from Zhou sources or later writers sympathetic to them, and their portrait of Di Xin grew darker over the centuries. Early texts present him as a foolish, ineffective king; the Records of the Grand Historian, written centuries later, describe a drunken tyrant who tortured critics and neglected the ancestral rites under the influence of his consort Daji. Some later scholars doubted these stories, and the surviving oracle bone records from his reign show him making the usual sacrifices to his ancestors. Daji does not appear in them at all. Whether Di Xin's misrule really caused the revolt is therefore uncertain.

Traditional figures give the Zhou about 45,000 foot soldiers, 3,000 elite troops and a few hundred chariots, joined by several allied peoples. Di Xin, whose main forces were away in the east, is said to have raised a much larger army, by one traditional figure 170,000 men, many of them reportedly slaves, though such numbers cannot be checked. According to the accounts, much of the Shang army fled or went over to the Zhou, while those who stayed fought a bloody battle, celebrated in a poem of the Book of Songs. A Zhou chariot charge led by King Wu broke the Shang line. Later texts claim the slaughter was great enough for blood "to float a log".

The traditional story says that Di Xin fled to his palace, climbed the Deer Terrace Pavilion with his treasures and burned it with himself inside. An older text, the Yi Zhou Shu, gives a harsher account in which King Wu massacred people in Yin and killed the king himself. The Zhou then opened the Shang granaries and employed some Shang officials. A Shang prince, Wu Geng, was allowed to continue the Shang rites at Yin under the watch of three of King Wu's brothers, but after Wu's death they joined Wu Geng in a rebellion against the regent, the Duke of Zhou. Once it was crushed, many Shang people were resettled elsewhere.

The day and month of the battle are recorded, but not the year, and earlier scholars proposed dozens of dates between 1130 and 1018 BC; the Han dynasty astronomer Liu Xin favoured 1122 BC, and others argued for 1027 BC. The Xia–Shang–Zhou Chronology Project combined radiocarbon dates from Zhou and Shang sites with ancient astronomical records and settled on 20 January 1046 BC. Critics question the method, and one alternative reading of the evidence gives 9 January 1044 BC. The battlefield itself has not been found.

Our 1500 BCE map shows the era of the Shang, and the 1000 BCE map the early Zhou period in China.