Xie of Shang

Also known as Zi Xie · Yin Xie · Xuan Wang

Xie, also called Yin Xie or Zi Xie and named the Dark King in the Shang hymns of the Book of Songs (Shijing), is the legendary ancestor of the Shang people. The Basic Annals of Yin in the Records of the Grand Historian (Shiji) say that his mother Jiandi, a woman of the Yousong clan and a secondary consort of Di Ku, swallowed an egg dropped by a dark bird while bathing and so conceived him. The same chapter says that he helped Yu control the floods, and that Shun made him minister of instruction to teach the five relationships, enfeoffed him at Shang and gave him the clan name Zi. The hymn The Dark Bird opens by saying that Heaven ordered the dark bird to descend and give birth to Shang. In the Shiji genealogy more than ten generations separate him from Cheng Tang, who overthrew the Xia, while the Preface to the Book of Documents counts eight moves of the clan's seat in between.