Lesson video

Our lesson today is all about the end of the Shang Dynasty.

How sad we come to the end of the Shang Dynasty? So the Shang Dynasty lasted for 500 years, but how did it come to an end? That's what we're going to be finding out about today.

And this is what our lesson looks like.

First of all, we're going to just recap the achievements of the Shang, okay.

We're going to think about what were the great things that over the 500 years, this civilization managed to achieve.

We'll then look at a king called King Zhou or Emperor zhou who was the last king of the Shang Dynasty, the last emperor.

We is going to get a little bit gory, so beware, because we're going to learn more about some cruel and unusual punishment.

They're really horrible.

You might be a bit scared, so make sure that you have, maybe you've got a Teddy near you, so you can cut along to them to protect you because it's the cruel and unusual punishment, it's a bit gruesome.

And of course, then we're going to find out how the dynasty changed.

So from the Shang Dynasty to a new dynasty.

And you'll finish with your end of lesson quiz as usual.

So let's start by recapping the achievements of the Shang.

I'm going to now just tell you about some of the things that I think were amazing that Shang achieved as a civilization that we know about.

And at the end, I'm going to ask you to pick your favourite.

So pay close attention.

The first one, the first thing the Shang achieved is, well, have a look at this.

I haven't shown you this before.

Have a look at this artefact that was found.

What do you think this is? This is, well, I'll show you a picture of what it might've looked like, a recent picture of what it might've looked like.

This is a kind of vehicle which was drawn by horses.

So they attached horses to these wheels on their little platform, and the Shang would use this during battles.

So the horses would pull them along.

They could go very, very quickly and you can see them using that dagger-axe, and that bow and arrow there.

And the, it's called, this is called a chariot, my turn, your turn a chariot, chariot.

And the Shang perfected these chariots, which made them very successful in battle.

That's how they were able to win so many battles.

Now it was quite peaceful during the Shang.

They weren't big, big wars and lots and lots of battles.

There were some battles throughout history, lots of people competing for land.

So there would have been some battles and the Shang were very successful in battles because they had these chariots and they had these bronze weapons.

That's one of the achievements of the Shang people, chariots and weapons.

Put that one in your head.

Chariots and weapons, one of the achievements.

We know the next one, the Shang were one of the earliest civilizations to discover writing, not the first civilization in the world, but it's the earliest evidence in China.

Dynasties before the Shang weren't writing, so we don't know a lot about them.

And they wrote on these oracle bones that we know all about.

So that's another great achievement of the Shang Dynasty So we've got chariots.

Let's make sure we stick those in our head.

We've got chariots and weapons and we've got writing, two great achievements of the Shang Dynasty.

What else did the Shang do? Well, this is a new one that I haven't told you about before.

This is a map of the stars, and we know that the Shang looked at the stars because they looked up for the mandate of heaven.

They thought their ancestors were up in the sky, in the stars and that they would get messages from their ancestors through the stars.

They called them the heavens, the stars.

And they looked at very carefully and they wrote down calculations of the moon and the positions of the stars.

And when somebody does that, then we call them an astronomer.

It's called astronomy.

That's what that subject is.

Looking at the stars and the planets is called astronomy.

And the Shang were great astronomers, astronomers, I can't say it properly, astronomers.

The Shang were great astronomers.

And what they did is they drew pictures of the different constellations.

Maybe if it's dark tonight and if you're lucky enough to have a garden, or you can just look out the window, you might be able to look up and see if you can see the stars and constellations and pick out any stars or planets.

And that's what the Shang did.

And they drew maps of them, so they could know about all the stars and constellations were.

They even calculated the exact length of a year.

So there are 365 days in one year, every year that's 365 days.

That's not actually quite right because a year is how long it takes the earth to go around the sun one time.

The earth orbits the sun, and it takes 365 days, but it doesn't.

It actually takes 365 and a quarter days, it's not exact.

It's 365 and a quarter days.

That's why every four years we have a leap year because we have to add the extra day on.

So every four years we add an extra day on, the 29th of June, to add up those quarters.

And the Shang knew about this, even though it was thousands of years ago, they didn't have fancy telescopes.

They didn't have computers.

They could still calculate that it was exactly 365 and a quarter days.

I'm amazed that they're able to do that.

And so the Shang would chart the phases of the moon, notice that the moon had regular phases where sometimes it's a half moon.

Sometimes it's a crescent moon.

Sometimes it's a full moon.

Every 28 days, when the moon travels around the earth, we get their different phases.

So they were great astronomers, weapons and chariots, writing, astronomy.

What else were they doing? Gosh, they were so successful as a civilization.

They did great bronze work and jade sculpture.

So this bronze, they worked out to smoke bronze, but then also crafted them into these beautiful, complicated, intricate pieces.

I don't think I could make one of those, even if you gave me the materials, it's too beautiful and requires too much skill, but they were able to do it.

They also caught these amazing sculptures or figures out of jade that you can see that.

If you could even have a go at this yourself, you probably don't have any jade to hand.

But if there's like a bar of soap, an old bar of soap, if you get your parents' permission, then what you could do is you could take that soap and you can take a knife and make sure you've got your parents' permission.

And you can just take a normal dinner knife, and you could use that to try and curve a jade sculpture.

That would be a fun activity to see if you could make it look just like this, but please make sure that you get a grown up first, okay? So here's my question for you.

There are loads of achievements, okay.

We found out that there are loads of achievements to the Shang civilization.

They were really successful.

That's why I love learning about them because there was such a successful civilization with so many amazing things.

My question for you is what do you think was the greatest achievement of the Shang Dynasty? Okay, so I'll just recap.

There was writing.

I'll put them down here so you can remember.

There was chariots and weapons.

There was the phases of the moon and astronomy.

There were the jade sculptures and the jade carving, and then bronze work, making different things out of bronze.

So pause the video.

And I'd like you to write a sentence saying what you think the greatest achievement of the Shang was.

Pause the video and do that task now.

Okay, finished? Remember you can take a photo, ask a parent or carer to put it on Twitter with #learnwithoak @OakNational.

I'll put that at the end and I'll be able to read it.

And I'd love to see the sentences that you write and what you think the best achievement of the Shang was.

So those are the achievements of the Shang.

Amazing, over 500 years, amazing civilization.

The final emperor, in about the year 1066, was somebody called King Zhou.

Okay, so Emperor Zhou or King Zhou.

Emperor and king mean pretty much the same thing.

Here's a picture of him.

This is what he might have looked like.

This is much later.

So this is what somebody much later thought he might have looked like.

And he had different names.

Back then people would have different names.

They would change their name as they got new titles.

So one of his names was Wu Deng.

Another was Di Xin.

And he's usually known as King Zhou.

And because I know that you love writing in Chinese.

I found out how to write his name in Chinese characters, in case you want to copy those down.

So this is what his name looks like in Chinese, King Zhou.

So what I'd like you to do now is just pause down the video and copy down the different names.

'Cause he had different kinds of names.

We're going to refer to him as King Zhou.

But copy down the names so that you know that this was all referring to the same person, that last king of the Shang Dynasty.

Pause the video and copy it down now.

Great, finished, well done.

You're working hard.

What kind of a king would do you think King Zhou was? Do you think that he was a really noble king, a loving king, a compassionate and caring king, like Emperor Tang? No, he wasn't.

King Zhou was a terrible, cruel king.

Let's find out why he was so terrible and cruel.

Well, we know that King Zhou in his palace, he had a huge lake and lots of trees.

And guess what he put in that lake? So he had this huge lake, guess what he filled it with? Not water, he filled it with alcohol.

So he had a lake of alcohol by his palace so that him and all of his friends could go in the lake and drink the alcohol and get drunk all of the time.

He would do that.

Well, even though there were some people that were very poor in his kingdom, he would be drinking alcohol and getting drunk.

That's not all he did.

What did he put on the trees? What do you think that he put on the trees? Bearing in mind that there are people in the Shang Dynasty who haven't got anything to eat, King Zhou would hang strips of meat from the trees.

So there, he would go into that lake, swim around, drinking the alcohol, getting all drunk and then go to one of the trees and pull down some meat from the trees.

Even though his people didn't have very much food.

Now we're starting to see why he wasn't very popular.

Pause the video now.

Why don't you have a go at drawing King Zhou's lake.

So you might draw his palace.

You might draw the lake with the alcohol in it, and you might draw the trees in the background with meat hanging down of it.

Meat hanging off them.

Pause the video and see if you can draw the terrible King Zhou's palace, lake of alcohol and trees of meat.

That's not the only reason that King Zhou was known as a cruel and terrible king because he didn't just enjoy alcohol and meat and luxuries all of the time while his people didn't have very much.

And he actually raised high taxes as well to pay.

You remember Emperor Tang lowered his taxes, I did write about that at the start, lowered the taxes, so people didn't have to pay as much to the king.

King Zhou higher the taxes so he could get more money for his alcohol and meat.

That's not all he did though.

He also had these horrible punishments.

So here's King Zhou.

And King Zhou had a wife, a bride known, here's a picture of her.

And she was known as Daji.

And she's known in ancient Chinese as a really, really horrible queen who would sort of encourage King Zhou to do horrible things and King Zhou did not need much encouraging.

And so they would encourage each other and watch doing these cruel and horrible punishments.

And one of them was he would take people that he didn't like and he would throw them into a pit filled with poisonous scorpions and poisonous snakes.

Can you imagine what it would be like if you were in the Shang Dynasty and the king brought you and put you in a pit and filled it with snakes that are poisonous and scorpions? It sounds horrible.

That's not all he did.

He also for entertainment, for fun, he would take people that he didn't like and he would put them on a kind of metal canon, a metal barrel, and it would be covered in oil.

Like and maybe your parents cook with oil, put oil in the pan.

So he would cover that big metal canon with oil and he would put people on it and then he would start a big fire underneath it.

So the canon got hotter and hotter and the oil got slippery and slippier and the people would fall off the canon, and slip off the cannon because it was too hot, into the flames.

And while King Zhou and Daji, would be watching that and laughing while it happened.

Gosh, what a terrible king King Zhou was? So I'd like you now to think about Emperor Tang.

Our first emperor, the emperor who offered to sacrifice himself for his people and gave a gold coin for people and lowered the taxes and told me they didn't need to be in the army so much.

Think about Emperor Tang on the one hand that we learned about in lesson two, and think about King Zhou now Emperor Tang was the first king.

King Zhou was the last king.

What is different about them? What's different about King Zhou and Emperor Tang? Write your answer down now.

In fact, let me help.

I've got a sentence there for you And I want you to delete the incorrect word.

So it says King Zhou was a wonderful/terrible emperor, whereas Emperor Tang was kind or cruel.

Write out that sentence with just the correct word.

Okay, great, so it should look like this.

King Zhou was a terrible emperor, whereas on the other hand, Emperor Tang was kind.

And I'd like you to give a reason.

And we've just learned about King Zhou.

Why was he considered a cruel leader? Excuse me, that should say leader.

Why was King Zhou considered a cruel leader? King Zhou is considered a cruel leader because, finish that sentence.

Pause the video and finish that sentence.

Amazing work, well done.

So our last part is all about the end of the Shang Dynasty.

So remember a dynasty is a group of leaders, a family, where they pass on the being emperor from father to son, from father to son.

And the Shang Dynasty had 17 generations, 17 fathers passing on to sons, and it lasted for 500 years.

But with King Zhou we start to get, we finally get a change of dynasty.

Now this next bit I will warn you, this next bit is a little bit confusing.

So make sure your brain is switched on and you're thinking hard because the Shang, let me show you a map.

Look at where the Shang Dynasty is there, around the yellow river.

Can you see it, the green bit? So that's the Shang Dynasty, okay.

This little green bit.

And surrounding the Shang Dynasty, there was another dynasty, another state, another group.

And they were called the Zhou Dynasty.

Now this is confusing because there was King Zhou, the leader of the Shang Dynasty, and then there was also the Zhou Dynasty, which is a different kind of people.

Now in Chinese, we actually say the Zhous differently.

It's a bit like you could have, in English, you can have row and raw and it's spelled the same way, but you say them differently.

In Chinese, we say the green Zhou and the pink Zhou differently.

They say it with a different accent, a different inflexion.

So there was the state of Zhou, surrounding the Shang Dynasty.

And in the year about the year 1066, something amazing happened.

Five of the planets lined up.

The Shang looked up at the sky and the Zhou looked up at the sky and they saw that five planets were all in a straight line.

And you might remember that was called the mandate of heaven.

It only happened this, the planets only line up like that every 516 years.

The last time it happened was when Emperor Tang became emperor.

It only happens every 516 years.

So we've got a cruel emperor, just like the Emperor Di who Tang took over from and the mandate of heaven has happened.

And so, well, first of all, let me see if you can remember.

What did the ancient Chinese believe that a mandate of heaven meant? So now King Zhou is in charge.

He's being cruel, and there's a mandate of heaven.

There is, the planets are lining up.

What does that mandate of heaven mean to the ancient Chinese? Does it mean a great drought will be coming? Does b, it mean the world was going to end? Does it mean that the ancestors are pleased or does it mean that a change in ruler is necessary? We need a new dynasty.

What did the ancient Chinese believe? Point to the option that you think is correct.

Put your finger on it.

Did you choose D? Well done, if you did.

The ancient Chinese thought that if there was a mandate of heaven, then a new dynasty, a new ruler was needed.

And so the leader of the Zhou Dynasty that purple state around the Shang, they saw the mandate of heaven and they thought, "We need to take over the Shang Dynasty.

We need to get rid of that awful King Zhou." So the state of Zhou is going now for the King Zhou.

So the leaders of the state of Zhou or the country of Zhou, was, the king was somebody called King Wu and King Wu's brother was actually killed by King Zhou of the Shang Dynasty.

So King Wu is already crushed with the Shang Dynasty.

He can see that they've got a horrible king.

He can see there's a mandate of heaven, and his brother was killed by King Zhou.

And so King Wu sends his most brilliant advisor and general, this person here called Jiang Ziya.

And he sent him to the Shang, and Jiang Ziya, so these are the two leaders of the state of Zhou and Jiang Ziya goes straight to the capital of the Shang Dynasty.

And do you know what he finds? As he's taking his armies through the Shang people, they don't really fight back.

They don't, they just surrender.

They say, "Okay, you can be in charge." They refuse to fight for King Zhou.

Why might they refuse to fight for their king? Why did the Shang people refuse to fight for their king? Why do you think? Haven't think.

Well, King Zhou was being horrible, wasn't he? He was not a good leader.

He was making them pay lots of taxes.

He was being cruel.

And so when somebody else said they want to be in charge, then the Shang people thought, "That's okay, because we don't like our leader anyway." And so the Zhou took over Emperor Zhou, King Zhou who the last of the Shang kings, he could see that he'd lost the battles.

He could see that he'd lost the dynasty and so do you know what he did? He locked himself up in his palace with all of his alcohol and meat and possessions, and he set the whole thing on fire until it was burned to the ground.

So that is the end of the Shang Dynasty.

And now the Zhou were in charge of the new dynasty called the Zhou Dynasty.

So your final question had, why did the Shang people refuse to fight for their king? When the Zhou, the new Zhou leader, that's like King Wu and Jiang Ziya came and the Shang people refuse to fight for the king.

Why do you think that that is? Pause the video and write your answer.

So your answers should start with, the Shang people refuse to fight for King Zhou because, and some of the reasons that you might've put was he made cruel punishments on his people.

He was not a kind leader.

He made the taxes too high.

Well done, if you've got any of those reasons.

And that was the end of our lesson.

So please, please, please.

I love to read your work.

So send it through on Twitter so that I can say how wonderful it is and give you some feedback just like others have been doing.

Get your parent or carer to do that.

So your parent or carer needs to do it.

Not you, you shouldn't have a Twitter account.

So ask your parent or carer to take a photo, put it up on Twitter so that I can see it and look at your great work and share it with me.

I look forward to seeing that.

In our next lesson, we're going to be doing something quite interesting.

In our next lesson, we're going to be writing an essay.

So now we've got so much knowledge about the Shang people, we're ready to write a long piece of writing, called an essay, where we are going to like real historians, write so much information about the Shang Dynasty to tell other people everything that we know, because now we've mastered this topic of the Shang Dynasty.

I can't wait to start writing that essay with you and to read what you come up with, now that you're so clever on the Shang Dynasty.

Thank you for working so hard.

I'll see you next time.

Goodbye.