ABSTRACT
I have not wanted to dwell too much on late fictionalised accounts of the Conquest story in the first section of the book, preferring to concentrate on the earliest historical sources. But the account would be incomplete without some mention of the tradition that the Shang tyrant Zhou Xin, while he had King Wen imprisoned, secretly fed him his own son, Yi Kao, in the form of meat pies. This was regarded as a test of King Wen's divinatory powers, to gauge whether he would be a threat in the future if released from Youli. This episode was imaginatively elaborated in Chapters 19 and 20 of the Ming dynasty novel Feng Shen Yan Yi, the Investiture of the Gods, an anachronistic tale of 100 chapters packed with supernatural happenings, Daoist immortals, gods in disguise, magical weapons, germ warfare, and a mass inoculation programme organised by the spirit of Shen Nong, patron of herbalists. King Wen's octogenarian minister and military strategist Jiang Ziya, also known as Taigong and Lu Shang, becomes the central character, upstaging Kings Wen and Wu, In Chapter 99 Jiang Ziya deifies all the participants in the drama, both good and bad: hence the title. It is not the best Chinese novel ever written, being both repetitive and long-winded, and it cannot bear comparison with such classics as Shuihuzhuan or Hongloumeng, 1 but nonetheless it does have some entertaining set-pieces, such as the 'Banquet of the Spectres' in Chapter 25.
