Zhou King Muwang's Travels: A Fictional Dissection of Ancient China's Rendezvous with Queen Mother of the West - Paperback

by Hong Yuan (Author)

Zhou King Muwang's Travels, which appeared to be about the Zhou king's travel to the West and his rendezvous with the Queen Mother of the West, i.e., daughter of the lord on high per se, was taken by the Western historians to be about some prehistoric East-West exchange, with Charles Hucker equating the queen mother to Queen Sheba. However, this mythopoeic book was about divination and in fact a pure fiction on the same par as the Shanghai Museum bamboo slips called Jian-da-wang Po Han (Chu King Jianwang's suffering from drought [or dispelling drought]). The repetitiveness of narratives related to the Zhou king's visits with the western desert tribal chieftains in the former, which was highly artificially crafted, was run in the same groove as the repetitiveness of the Chu king's drought auguries with close to a dozen of his ministers and diviners in the latter.

Zhou King Muwang's Travels was among the bamboo slips retrieved from the Ji-zhong tomb in A.D. 279, that included the materials that came to be known as The Bamboo Annals, plus Ji-zhong Suo-yu (trivial statements from the Ji-jun commandery tomb, a collection of mysterious novels rampant in the Warring States period, covering monsters, weird words, anecdotes, court secrets, sorcery, dreams, and stories related to the Yellow Thearch and the three saints Yao, Shun and Yu, et al.), etc. The hoard of divinatory materials from the Ji-zhong tomb shed light on the rampant epidemic of sophistry, divination and fables in the late Warring States time period. Calling both Zhou King Muwang's travels and Chu King Jianwang (r. 427-405 B.C. per Xi Nian; 431-408 B.C. per Shi-ji)'s prayer for rain by divination and pure fiction could be somewhat hubristic in light of the whole Sinologist world's obsession with those topics. But the truth was that the former was not about the Zhou king's travels of the 11th-10th centuries B.C. and the latter not about the Chu king's rain praying of the 5th century B.C., other than divination and fiction similar to what the Western Jinn historians concluded for the materials in Ji-zhong Suo-yu.

Zhou King Muwang's Travels contained six travelogues that covered three discrete stories of no successive bearing to one another. The first four travelogues, i.e., visit with Count of the Yellow River at today's northeastern Yellow River Bend, travel to mount Kunlun [where the Yellow Thearch's palaces and Feng-long's tomb were], rendezvous with Queen Mother of the West and three months' hunting at the northern feather wilderness, were about longevity, immortality and divination; the 5th travelogue was about hunting and divination around the Eastern Zhou capital district area on the false assumption that the Western Zhou kings had already relocated eastward, a symptom of retrograde amnesia; and the last travelogue was about the Zhou dynasty mourning customs.

The first four travelogues, with the stories centered on the western territories that had the rumored Kunlun mountain, had the intrinsic value in ascertaining the geographical knowledge of ancient Chinese. Note Kunlun and Xuanpu (hanging garden) were not seen in The Spring & Autumn Annals and Zhou Yi. The fifth travelogue was actually the very materials that could debunk the forgery nature of the contemporary version of The Bamboo Annals as the king's travel itineraries were inadvertently aligned in the wrong and inverted order in the said annals. Before the ancient Chinese looked beyond the Pamirs for Kunlun and the western queen mother, the western queen mother appeared to have her temple right on the outskirts of the capital city Chang'an from the time of Han Emperor Wudi, with the western queen mother being a state-sanctioned Taoist goddess. There was beyond reasonable doubt about the forgery bamboo annals' entry on the queen mother's visiting the Zhou king and staying a guest at the Z