identified King Wen with a 周方白[a]; Zhōufāng bó; 'Elder of Zhou region' mentioned in inscriptions H11:82 & H11:84 among oracle bones excavated at Zhouyuan (周原), Qishan County.

Jili was betrayed and executed by the Shang king Wen Ding in the late 12th century BC, leaving the young Chang as the Elder of the Zhou lineage.

At one point, King Zhou of Shang, fearing Wen's growing power, imprisoned him in Youli (present-day Tangyin in Henan) after he was slandered by the Marquis of Chong.

[3] His eldest son, Bo Yikao, went to King Zhou to plead for his freedom, but was executed in a rage by lingchi and made into meat cakes which were fed to his father in Youli.

In his first year as Overlord of the West, he settled a land dispute between the states of Yu and Rui, earning greater recognition among the nobles.

That same year he moved his administrative capital city[5] one hundred kilometers east from Mount Qi to Feng, placing the Shang under imminent threat.

[6] Four years after his death, his second son, known as King Wu, followed his footsteps and crushed the Shang at Muye, founding the Zhou dynasty.

He was the only noble to bear the posthumous name "Wen" for almost the entire first half of the Zhou dynasty, despite its common usage as an epithet of eulogy, suggesting a special privilege.

In May, the densest clustering in five hundred years' time of the five planets visible to the naked eye could be seen in the constellation of Cancer, followed a few seasons later by an apparition of Comet 1P/Halley.

[14]: 30–31  Early records, such as the inscription on the Da Yu ding, describe Heaven's Mandate in terms of an actual astronomic event: "the great command in the sky" (天有大令).

[13]: 39 [b] The transmitted record does not place King Wen's receipt of the Mandate in his biography, although the widespread traditions that hold the idea of its existence to be true universally agree that he did receive it at some point during his career.