Wang Hai
Mythological Narrative
In the country of Kunmin, the Great Wilderness: East records a strange tableau: a man named Wang Hai grips a bird in both hands and is eating its head. One sentence disposes of his life: Wang Hai entrusted his tamed oxen to the lord of Youyi and to the River Earl; Youyi killed Wang Hai and took the oxen. Afterward the River Earl, pitying Youyi, smuggled out its survivors to found the country of Yaomin among the wild beasts.
The full story is assembled from other texts. Guo Pu's commentary quotes the Bamboo Annals: the Yin prince Hai, a guest in Youyi, committed adultery there, and its ruler Mianchen killed him; later Hai's heir Shangjia Wei borrowed troops from the River Earl, destroyed Youyi, and slew Mianchen. The Heavenly Questions turns the affair over in a chain of anguished questions. The Shiben credits Hai with 'harnessing the ox' — the invention of ox-drawn transport on which his people's wandering trade was built, the very people whose name, Shang, became the Chinese word for merchant.
In 1917 Wang Guowei identified the 'High Ancestor Hai' receiving lavish cult in the oracle-bone inscriptions with the Wang Hai of the Classic, the Heavenly Questions, and the Bamboo Annals, proving the mythic figure a real pre-dynastic lord of Shang. It remains the textbook case of excavated writing corroborating myth — the more striking because some oracle-bone forms of the graph 'Hai' carry a bird element, echoing the man holding birds in both hands.
Academic Discussion & Critique
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