King Wen of Zhou: After His Imprisonment at Youli, Why Did People Still Turn West?

Sima Qian’s Historical Memories · Story 11 An AI-assisted contemporary adaptation by Clio Walker. The first-person voice is a literary use of Sima Qian’s perspective, not his original wording, an eyewitness record, or a real submission by him.

After the Western Earl Chang was imprisoned at Youli, the first people to act were not soldiers but the retainers who remained in the west.

The Records of the Grand Historian says that Hongyao and the others were alarmed. They sought a beautiful woman from the Youxin clan, patterned horses from the Lirong, nine teams of horses from Youxiong, and other rare objects. Through Feizhong, a favourite at the Shang court, they presented these things to King Zhou. The king was delighted. He reportedly said that one of the gifts would have been enough to release the prisoner, much less all of them. The Western Earl was allowed to leave Youli.

The story does not say how the gifts were transported, how long the negotiations took, or what a Shang order of release looked like. I cannot invent a secret council for Hongyao and San Yisheng, or give the prisoner unrecorded fear and hope. What the transmitted narrative does establish is that Zhou’s men did not disperse when their leader was removed. They identified a channel into the Shang court, assembled goods that could move the king, and turned a political emergency into a rescue they could complete.

In my Basic Annals of Zhou, the cause is equally brief and sharp. Chonghou Hu warned King Zhou that the Western Earl was accumulating virtue and that the lords were turning toward him. This, he said, would harm the Shang ruler. The king therefore confined the Western Earl at Youli. The danger was not an open rebellion. The accuser pointed instead to reputation. A man’s good treatment of retainers and his growing credit among the lords had already become threatening to the court.

Ji Chang succeeded his father Jili and held the title Western Earl, one of the leading lords on Shang’s western side. Later generations honoured him as King Wen of Zhou. At this point in the story he was not yet the ruler of a Zhou dynasty. He controlled land, kin, retainers, and allies in the west, while still living within an order in which the Shang king could recognize and punish him. Youli was therefore not a ritual trial endured by a future victor. It was a detention that could have broken Zhou’s political continuity.

I described him as following the work of Houji, Gongliu, Gugong Danfu, and Jili. He cultivated humane conduct, respected the old, cared for the young, and lowered himself to receive worthy men, sometimes remaining too busy to eat at midday. Boyi and Shuqi, hearing that he cared well for elders, considered joining him. Taidian, Hongyao, San Yisheng, Yuzi, Xin Jia, and others also came west. This is an image of the worthy ruler arranged by later dynastic memory, not a complete visitor register. It nevertheless defines Zhou’s growing power first as the willingness of people to come.

That willingness was the reverse of the danger at the Shang court. King Zhou could imprison a man, while the Western Earl could make distant men travel to him. Shang possessed the power to punish. Chang accumulated relationships that made others willing to work for him. Youli tested more than his endurance. It tested whether those relationships could continue when he was absent.

The ransom through precious goods does not fit the cleanest later portrait of a sage king. The gifts included a woman, horses, and rare objects. They remind us that the rescue operated through a real economy of power. The people and things transferred to the Shang court have no voice in the account. Loyalty among Zhou’s retainers deserves to be seen, but the cost of their method should not disappear behind praise.

After releasing him, King Zhou granted the Western Earl the bow, arrows, axe, and halberd that authorized campaigns. He also identified Chonghou Hu as the accuser. Chang then offered territory west of the Luo River and asked that the paoge punishment be abolished; King Zhou agreed. The Records places the moves together: the Shang king released him and extended military authority, while the Western Earl surrendered land and petitioned against a cruel punishment. We cannot reconstruct every condition of the settlement, but we can see that release did not end their relationship. It rearranged it.

On the surface, King Zhou still controlled the arrangement. The weapons of authority came from the Shang ruler and allowed the Western Earl’s campaigns to proceed in Shang’s name. Yet a lord authorized to campaign and increasingly treated as an arbiter by other lords also gained room to act. King Zhou may have believed he was returning a useful western vassal. The transmitted story allows readers to see a rival political center returning home.

The Hereditary House of the Grand Duke of Qi brings another figure into this transition: Lü Shang, later called Taigong Wang. I preserved three versions of his entry into Zhou. In one, he was an old and impoverished man who used fishing to approach the Western Earl. Chang met him north of the Wei River while hunting, brought him back in his carriage, and appointed him as teacher. A second says he had served King Zhou, left the unjust ruler, travelled among the lords without finding a place, and finally went west. A third says he had lived in retirement by the sea. When Chang was imprisoned, San Yisheng and Hongyao summoned him, and the three gathered precious gifts to ransom the captive.

These versions cannot be fitted into one exact day’s itinerary. The fishing encounter, the wandering counsellor, and participation in the rescue are competing explanations of how Lü Shang entered Zhou service. My text acknowledged the differences and concluded only that he became teacher to Kings Wen and Wu. A modern retelling must preserve that “another account says.” The more memorable a famous strategist’s entrance, the more necessary it becomes to ask whether we have several witnesses to one event or several memories competing to explain it.

After Chang returned from Youli, the Qi chapter says that he and Lü Shang planned in secret, cultivating virtue while undermining Shang’s government. Much of this concerned military authority and unusual stratagems, but the chapter does not reveal a sequence of secret operational plans. I cannot spread a map before them at night or invent an oath to destroy Shang. We can say only that Zhou continued to attract the lords while preparing and fighting wars. Reputation and force were not separate roads.

The best-known reputation story concerns a dispute between Yu and Rui. The two sides could not resolve their case and went to seek the Western Earl’s judgment. After crossing into Zhou territory, they saw farmers yielding field boundaries and younger people giving precedence to elders. Before meeting Chang, they felt ashamed. They decided that the object of their quarrel was precisely what Zhou people regarded as disgraceful, and returned home to yield to each other. Other lords heard of this and said the Western Earl seemed to be a ruler who had received Heaven’s mandate.

This is not a court record whose hearing can be reconstructed word for word. We do not know the litigants’ names, the disputed boundaries, or their route home. Nor can it prove that every Zhou field was free of conflict. The story endured because it represented political attraction as an order that worked without a command. The visitors changed their decision after seeing Zhou conduct, before entering the lord’s hall.

It would be easy to make the account too gentle. The Western Earl did not rely only on visitors. He then launched a sequence of wars. The Basic Annals lists campaigns against the Quanrong, Mixu, Li, Yu, and finally Chonghou Hu. It says he constructed the settlement at Feng and moved there from the foot of Mount Qi. Absolute years, routes, scale, and the modern identification of the ancient places are disputed. The repeated phrase “the following year” cannot be mechanically converted into secure BCE dates.

One turn should not disappear. The man who accused Chang at the Shang court later became the target of Chang’s campaign. Chonghou Hu had described the lords’ attraction to the Western Earl as a danger to Shang. Once released and granted campaign authority, the Western Earl eventually attacked Chong. The transmitted story links accusation, imprisonment, release, authorization, and a war that resembles revenge. We have no Chong account of these events and should not treat the victor’s moral judgment as one accepted by both sides.

Building Feng moved Zhou’s center farther east. The later Fenghao archaeological sites lie in the modern Xi’an region, and archaeology establishes the area as an important Western Zhou capital zone. It cannot automatically verify each detail in the Records about King Wen’s conquest of Chong and construction of Feng, or turn a modern marked point into the gate of his city. This story therefore leaves Feng, Qi, the Wei River encounter, Yu, Rui, and Chong as unresolved ancient locations rather than assigning false precision.

The tradition of “King Wen interpreting the Changes” needs the same boundary. In its retrospective passage on King Wu, the Basic Annals says that while confined at Youli, the Western Earl probably expanded the eight trigrams of the Changes into sixty-four hexagrams. The word “probably” already marks a traditional attribution. Later memory enlarged it, making Youli a sacred site of the Book of Changes and making King Wen appear to have completed the fully settled text known today. Archaeological finds and scholarship on the formation of the Zhouyi describe a far more complicated history. This story can say that Han historians connected the imprisonment with the Changes. It cannot claim proof that Ji Chang wrote the entire received text at Youli in one act.

The modern Youli City site north of Tangyin County is protected as a Major Historical and Cultural Site at the National Level. The mound preserves cultural deposits extending from the Longshan period into Shang and Zhou times, while its commemorative architecture reflects later rebuilding and continued remembrance. It supplies a regional reference for the Youli tradition, not a Shang-period plan locating Chang’s cell. The map therefore marks only the traditional Youli site region and states that the event itself comes from transmitted history.

The Western Earl did not live to see Muye. After his death, his heir Fa succeeded him and became King Wu. Wu made Taigong Wang his teacher and the Duke of Zhou his chief assistant, continuing Wen’s work. Once Zhou conquered Shang, later narrators looked back and placed the halo of a dynastic founder around the prisoner at Youli. Success made every earlier act of hospitality, arbitration, and campaigning look as though it had always led toward rule of the realm.

I do not wish to write that inevitability too strongly. When Chang was imprisoned, his followers did not know that Muye must happen. When they presented their gifts, they could not know that the Shang king would truly release him. The Yu-Rui episode explains reputation but cannot substitute for armies, grain, alliances, and geography. The force of King Wen’s story lies in the coexistence of moral narrative and political practice. He welcomed worthy men and accepted a rescue purchased with valuable goods. He requested the abolition of punishment and conducted campaigns. He became an arbiter of disputes and moved Zhou’s settlements east.

If we call him only humane, we cannot explain why the Shang court imprisoned him. If we call him only an able expansionist, we cannot explain why retainers risked so much when he lost his freedom. Youli brings the two together. The Shang king could temporarily control the Western Earl’s body, but he could not simultaneously reclaim the trust Chang had accumulated in the west.

Release was therefore not the story’s most important ending. After Chang returned, lords continued to come, disputes continued to be carried to Zhou, Lü Shang and others continued to plan, and Zhou’s wars continued. The prison door opened and restored a center to relationships that had never stopped working. “Hearts turning west” does not mean that everyone suddenly felt the same emotion. It means that more people placed judgment, service, alliance, and their view of the future on Zhou’s side.

As a historian, I knew that Zhou was the victor. Victors are especially able to present their rise as a mandate determined from the beginning. Yu and Rui withdrawing before they met Wen, the lords calling him the recipient of the mandate, and the claim that two-thirds of the realm adhered to Zhou all come from traditions preserved and arranged later. They deserve narration because they show how Zhou explained political legitimacy. They also deserve examination because the voices of Shang people, Chong, and other conquered communities did not survive with equal fullness.

At Youli, the scene most worth remembering is the one in which the Western Earl is absent. Hongyao and the others did not wait for Heaven’s mandate to open the prison door. They found people, horses, and rare objects, and used relationships already operating at the Shang court to recover their leader. The transmitted historian placed the episode on a sage king’s path to power. With some of that sacred glow removed, it remains a dangerous political operation.

When Ji Chang left Youli, King Zhou still ruled and Zhou remained a western dependency. Chang did not carry the realm home. He carried home the possibility of acting. What later made Zhou difficult for Shang to contain was that this possibility had not ended in prison. People were still willing to come, retainers were still willing to work, disputes were still being sent west, and cities and alliances were still moving.

Youli could confine a man. It could not close the roads leading to him.

Sources and adaptation boundary The principal source is chapter 4, “Basic Annals of Zhou,” in Sima Qian’s Records of the Grand Historian, particularly the King Wen section and the retrospective accounts of Youli, the ransom, the Yu-Rui dispute, successive campaigns, the construction of Feng, and the Changes tradition: https://zh.wikisource.org/wiki/史記/卷004 . Chapter 32, “Hereditary House of the Grand Duke of Qi,” was checked for the three versions of Lü Shang’s entry into Zhou, his possible role in the ransom, the planning after Chang’s return, and the claim that two-thirds of the realm adhered to Zhou: https://zh.wikisource.org/wiki/史記/卷032 . Modern location and heritage information for Youli City follows the Tangyin County government’s publication of April 29, 2024: https://www.tangyin.gov.cn/2024/04-29/3473524.html . The discussion of source layers for Western Zhou history and archaeological work at Fenghao follows the Institute of History, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences: https://lishisuo.cssn.cn/xsyj/gdwhs/202001/t20200116_5078823.shtml .

The Records was compiled long after King Wen’s lifetime. The Youli rescue, the yielding of Yu and Rui, the sequence of campaigns, and the stories of Lü Shang’s arrival belong to transmitted ancient history, not contemporary Shang archives. This retelling does not combine the three Lü Shang traditions into one itinerary or invent dialogue, interior thought, or scenery for the imprisonment, ransom, and arbitration. The connection between King Wen and the Changes is presented with the caution marked by the original “probably”; the story does not claim that Ji Chang composed the entire received Zhouyi at Youli in a single act. The modern Youli heritage site and its commemorative buildings provide a regional location for the tradition, not proof of a prison cell. Feng, Qi, the north bank of the Wei, Yu, Rui, and Chong remain unresolved ancient places rather than receiving forced coordinates. Repeated “following year” statements are not converted into exact BCE dates. The ancient texts are in the public domain; both language versions are original AI-assisted adaptations by Clio Walker.