King Wu Defeats Zhou (Battle of Muye)

In the late Shang, social conflicts sharpened and the slave-owning aristocracy grew more decadent. The last Shang ruler, Di Xin (King Zhou), campaigned against the Dongyi year after year, draining the state, built luxurious palaces, raised taxes and tortured people with punishments such as the “roasting.” According to the Records of the Grand Historian, “Annals of Yin,” he made “a pool of wine and a forest of hanging meat” and held drinking feasts through the night, the origin of the idiom “pool of wine, forest of meat.” Meanwhile the Zhou tribe, based on the Zhouyuan plain in the Wei River valley in Shaanxi, was an agricultural state that expanded under King Wen until it held “two thirds of the realm.” After Wen's death his son King Wu, aided by Lu Shang (Jiang Taigong), Duke of Zhou and others, joined the Yong, Shu, Qiang and other tribes and the lords in 1046 BC and marched east against Shang with a large allied army. The two sides fought a decisive battle at Muye (around Xinxiang, Henan) outside the Shang capital Chaoge. Though the Shang army was larger, it contained many slaves and prisoners hastily armed who were unwilling to die for King Zhou and turned their weapons on him; the Zhou army swept into Chaoge, King Zhou climbed the Deer Terrace and burned himself to death, and the Shang fell. King Wu founded the Zhou dynasty with its capital at Haojing (southwest of present-day Xi'an), known as the Western Zhou. The Li gui, unearthed in Lintong, Shaanxi, in 1976, records that King Wu attacked Shang on the morning of the jiazi day, confirming the ancient texts. The Xia–Shang–Zhou Chronology Project, using astronomical and archaeological study, sets the year of King Wu's conquest at 1046 BC.