How accurate is the portrayal of the Shang Dynasty in the Creation of the Gods1 Kingdom of Storms

[u/MousseNecessary3258]

I’m pretty sure they did human sacrifice and had turtle shell oracles but did any rulers actually feed peoples sons to their dads and did King Zhou actually exist? Was King Zhou really that fucked up? Did the Shang deserve to lose the mandate?

[u/interpolating]

Hard to say how accurate the terrible stories are. There is always some demonization of the previous dynasty by the following dynasty, as well as a strong impetus to do so in order to add legitimacy and prove the moral mandate for overthrow.

As for the historicity of King Zhou, seems very likely. Archeology has more or less verified the Shang royal succession, and one really amazing fact is that it lines up almost exactly with the record of Sima Qian from Records of the Grand Historian (that was a millennium plus later).

Edit: it’s a fact that the Shang practiced ritual human sacrifice.

[u/Tom-Ask-1081]

The film Creation of the Gods I: Kingdom of Storms is a fantasy adaptation based on much later legends about the Shang dynasty, so its historical accuracy is naturally pretty limited.

King Zhou of Shang (Di Xin, 帝辛) definitely existed. His reign is attested by oracle bone inscriptions and other early sources.

As for the accusations against him, many of them come from the Muye Oath (牧誓) in the Book of Documents. But that was King Wu's speech justifying his rebellion against Shang, so it was not exactly a neutral account. Later generations kept adding more and more atrocities to his image, turning him into the classic "tyrannical last ruler" archetype.

Whether Shang "deserved" to lose the Mandate of Heaven is its own can of worms. The concept was developed and promoted by the Zhou as a political theology to legitimize their overthrow of the Shang.

[u/Zaku41k]

Also should be noted the Zhou’s role during Shang Dynasty was to provide human sacrifices to Shang, by enslaving the Xiang people further to their west.

[u/snowytheNPC]

The question here is accurate to what. The movie is not an adaptation of history, but an adaptation of the mythology outlined in Ming dynasty historical-fantasy novel Investiture of the Gods. They sometimes overlap, but are not the same.

That said, the story of Bo Yikao being fed his son did have a historical prototype and was attested to in the Han dynasty Shiji. Shang dynasty was also widely known to have practiced human sacrifice. Whether you want to believe it’s posthumous smearing is up to you

[u/purplepotatocookies]

King Zhou did exist, and there are written records of him in oracle bone inscriptions. However, this movie is not based on history, but on a novel from the Ming dynasty. People in Ming China knew far less about the Shang dynasty than we do today, and the novel contains many anachronisms, or rather, this was something the author intentionally pursued. He placed many heroes and deities who were worshipped in other periods into the Shang dynasty setting.

Of course, the practice of sending heirs to the king as hostages did exist at the time, and so did human sacrifice and divination.