Shang is the ancient territory and dynastic setting through which the book situates several readings of the I Ching. It appears both as a political power in the account of the Zhou house’s rise and as the source of historical examples used to interpret hexagram lines. These references place divination within a world of contested rule, military action, ritual, and social norms, while the commentary cautions against treating every symbolic passage as a transparent record of events.

Political Setting and the Zhou Transition

The commentary contrasts Shang rule with the principality of Zhou, whose chief, later known as King Wen, had become a kind of viceroy over much of the kingdom. Although princes and people might have welcomed his leading an attack on the tyrant, he hesitated to expose himself to the charge of disloyalty. The ruler’s suspicion eventually led to King Wen’s imprisonment in 1143 BC, where he occupied himself with the lineal figures. This political context gives the figures a double aspect: they belong to an established practice of divination, but their interpretation could also address the disorder and prospects of the kingdom.

The commentary associates some symbolic material with the legitimacy of Zhou in relation to Shang. It suggests that a passage in one hexagram may testify to the merit of the house of Zhou as more deserving of the throne than the Shang kings. The author distinguishes this interpretation from the work attributed to the Duke of Zhou: the relevant symbolism, he argues, belongs to a period after King Wu had taken the throne, and may reflect the troubled regency following the accession of King Wu’s son, King Cheng. The suggestion is explicitly framed as an inference about when the symbolism was written, rather than as a certain account of its origin.

Shang Rulers and Military References

The commentary identifies Kao Zong as the sacrificial title of Wu Ding, an able sovereign of the Shang dynasty, and dates his reign to 1364–1324 BC. In interpreting a line about an undertaking, it connects the image to Wu Ding’s expedition against the peoples of the cold northern regions beyond the Middle States. The campaign may have been good and successful, the commentator says, but it was also tedious; the line’s conclusion therefore retains a note of caution rather than presenting military success as an unqualified good.

Elsewhere, Shang-era history enters the discussion through Ti Yi, identified as the penultimate sovereign of the Yin dynasty, whose reign is dated to 1191–1155 BC. The commentary says that the history of Ti Yi and the sister mentioned in the line is unknown. It rejects P. Regis’s conjecture that Ti Yi gave his sister in marriage to King Wen, identifying her as the famous Tai Si, because the commentator finds no evidence for that claim. A different traditional explanation, attributed to Cheng Yi, holds that Ti Yi first enacted a rule requiring daughters of the royal house who married princes of the states to be subordinate to their husbands. The uncertainty matters: the commentator separates what the line’s symbolism can support from a later biographical identification he considers unsubstantiated.

Divination and the Limits of Historical Meaning

The book describes divination by tortoise shell and stalks as an old practice, with references reaching back to texts attributed to early periods. By the time of King Wen, divination was an institution of his country; the commentary even allows that studying the figures in prison might have appeared harmless to his suspicious enemy. Its account of the practice distinguishes consultation from absolute prediction: divination was meant to test whether contemplated plans and conditions would turn out luckily or unluckily, not to disclose future events as settled facts.

The procedure described uses forty-nine stalks, manipulated three times for each line; eighteen manipulations form a hexagram. Numbers derived from the River Map determine whether lines are strong and undivided or weak and divided, and the resulting figure is interpreted through King Wen’s judgments and the Duke of Zhou’s emblematic line statements. In this account, numbers help form the hexagram; they are not treated as independent principles that produce or explain the material world. The commentator also notes that an account in the Book of Documents advises stillness when both tortoise-shell and stalk divinations oppose people’s views, while active operations would be unlucky. Shang is thus part of a historical setting in which divination shaped decisions, but the commentary confines its claimed use to assessing proposed courses of action rather than foretelling every future occurrence.

Marriage, Rank, and Political Analogy

Shang’s royal and aristocratic order also supplies context for the book’s marriage imagery. In discussing a hexagram about a younger sister’s marriage, the commentator explains that a feudal prince was said to marry nine women at once: a principal bride accompanied by two women from her father’s household, a cousin and a half-sister born to a lower-ranking mother. One line’s younger sister occupies the subordinate position of that half-sister. Although the arrangement is presented as socially disadvantageous, the line allows that she may still perform a measure of service; the commentator compares this to an able officer serving a ruler despite disadvantages of position.

The commentator argues that the marriage is illustrative rather than the hexagram’s ultimate subject. Its principles, in his reading, concern the relationship between a ruler and ministers. This interpretation sits alongside other passages that use marriage to express hierarchy and prescribed conduct: a commentary on another hexagram makes the wife’s firmness and correctness central to regulating the household, while an account of a different husband-and-wife pairing presents submission by the inferior party and firmness by the superior as the terms of a successful relation. Such passages reveal the gendered and hierarchical assumptions through which the commentary reads social order, but they should not be collapsed into direct historical evidence about Shang institutions.

A Dynastic Frame, Not a Single Place Narrative

Shang does not receive a continuous geographical description in the book. It functions instead as a dynastic and political frame: a power against which Zhou’s claim to rule is interpreted, a source of rulers and campaigns invoked in line commentary, and a background for discussions of rank and marriage. The commentary repeatedly qualifies these connections, distinguishing known dates and titles from conjecture, and symbolic instruction from historical report. Its treatment of Shang therefore makes the I Ching’s political resonance visible without reducing its hexagrams to a chronicle of the dynasty.