The King Who Shot at the Sky God
Over 3,100 years ago, a king named Wu Yi ruled China’s Shang dynasty. He wanted to insult the Sky God to his face, just to see what would happen.
He set up a game. His opponent was a wooden figure.
Wu Yi won.
“Some god you are. You can’t even beat me.”
Good thing I lost.
He’d made the figure himself and picked the man who played for it. What was there to brag about?
So he had a leather bag filled with blood and hung up high. This time, he wanted an answer from the Sky God himself.
Wu Yi waited.The sky stayed quiet.
The man in yellow peeked out from behind the servant. “Is the Sky God going to do anything?”
Later, Wu Yi went hunting between the Yellow and Wei rivers. Before they set off, a priest urged him to wait out the storm.
Wu Yi rode on into the woods.
His men heard a thunderclap. They turned back and found Wu Yi dead, struck by lightning.
When word reached the palace, the man in yellow found the servant again.
Based on an account in the Records of the Grand Historian. The characters’ thoughts, dialogue, and some scenes, including the priest’s warning, are dramatized.
Show me the source
Sima Qian wrote in the Han dynasty, centuries after the Shang. He tells the archery and hunting episodes in that order and leaves the time between them unspecified.
The Xia–Shang–Zhou Chronology Project dates Wu Yi’s reign to about 1147–1113 BCE. Late Shang chronology ↗
Original Chinese
帝武乙无道，为偶人，谓之天神。与之博，令人为行。天神不胜，乃僇辱之。为革囊，盛血，卬而射之，命曰“射天”。武乙猎于河渭之闲，暴雷，武乙震死。In English
King Wu Yi was an unruly ruler. He made a figure and called it a god of Heaven. He played a game against it, with someone else making its moves. The figure lost, and Wu Yi humiliated it. He filled a leather bag with blood, shot upward at it, and called this “shooting at Heaven.” A storm broke out while he was hunting between the Yellow and Wei rivers. He was struck by lightning and died.
What we dramatized
Wu Yi’s motives and dialogue, the spectators’ reactions, and the servant’s final joke are part of the retelling. The king’s gloating after the shot and the priest’s warning draw on chapters 17 and 18 of the modern Chinese novel 正史比野史还野，李世民崩溃.