Learning Chinese: King

“Conquerors are kings; the beaten are bandits.”

The form of the simple character 王 (wáng) meaning “king” has changed little throughout the ages. Composed of the number three (三, sān) connected by a vertical line, it represents the one who connected the Great Trinity of 天 (tiān, heaven), 地 (dì, earth) and 人 (rén, humankind). Scholars know that this was the original symbolism because Dong Zhongshu (179-104BC), who, as a chief minister in the Western Han dynasty (206BC-8AD), was partly responsible for establishing Confucianism as state orthodoxy, stated in his treatise How the Way of the King Joins the Trinity, “Those who in ancient times invented writing drew three lines and connected them through the middle, calling the character ‘king’. The three lines are Heaven, Earth and humankind, and that which passed through the middle joins the principle of all three.”

Before the 3rd century BC, China was divided into a number of rival states governed by kings. The kings of the Shang, the oldest historic dynasty, were essentially high priests, whose every act was preceded by divination and sacrifices, offered chiefly to the Shang ancestors. These ancestors were regarded as potent deities, who alone could intercede with the high god Di, or Shang Di, on humans’ behalf. It is these divination rites that produced the great quantities of “oracle bones”, inscribed with earliest extant Chinese characters. 

China’s states were eventually united under the First Emperor, Qin Shi Huang, whose reign began in 221BC. This new role, “emperor”, was akin to a “grand king” and the Chinese character meaning “emperor (皇, huáng)”, was originally composed of the radical for king, and that for “beginning”. 

Chinese rulers were seen to govern humankind on behalf of Heaven, which controlled all earthly and celestial phenomena. Natural disasters were, therefore, interpreted as Heaven’s judgment on the ruler. In times past, floods, earthquakes or droughts might have been seen as heralding a change of dynasty. The fact that the terrible Tangshan earthquake of 1976 occurred in the same year as the death of three communist leaders was widely viewed as more than coincidence.