On John Green's orgies in Ming-tʻiao

Recently I was re-enjoying John Green's CrashCourse World History. At 3:55 of the episode on Chinese history and the Mandate of Heaven, he says:

The Shujing is pretty specific about what caused the Xia kings to lose the Mandate, by the way, explaining, "The attack on Xia may be traced to the orgies in Ming Tiao."

Sadly the Shujing is woefully short on details of these orgies, but orgies are the kind of behavior that is not expected of a ruler, and therefore Heaven saw fit to come in, remove the Mandate, and allow the Shang to take power.

This got me intrigued: what is the original Chinese term that has been rendered as "orgies"?

Translation

The relevant snippet of the Shu King is from 《伊訓》, "Instructions of Yee". The Chinese source text below is from Chinese Text Project, but with olden-style punctuation: 先秦兩漢 > 經典文獻 > 尚書 > 商書 > 伊訓.

Source text	Target text	Notes
于其子孫弗率、皇天降災、假手于我有命、造攻自鳴條、朕哉自亳。	At their descendants not following [it], Great Heaven sent down calamities, borrowing [an] hand in our having [the] Mandate. [That we] commenced attack [was] from Ming-tʻiao, [and] our beginning [was] from Pok.	于： at; or upon 子孫： descendants; lit. children [and] grandchildren 弗率： not following [it] Specifically, not following the virtue of their ancestors, mentioned earlier in the text as 厥德, "their virtue". 皇： Great; or Sovereign

As can be seen, there is no mention of orgies in the original text. So where has John Green gotten them from?

Analysis

Legge (1879)

The translation quoted by John Green ultimately appears to come from James Legge's The Sacred Books of China: The Texts of Confucianism, Part I, the earliest edition of which I could find is 1879 (Oxford at the Clarendon Press).

On Page 93, the snippet is rendered thus:

But their descendant did not follow (their example), and great Heaven sent down calamities, employing the agency of our (ruler) who was in possession of its favouring appointment.* The attack (on Hsiâ) may be traced to (the orgies in) Ming-thiâo¹, but our (rise) began in Po.

¹ Ming-thiâo was a place not far from the capital of Kieh (in the present district of An-yî, Hâi Kâu, Shan-hsî). He had a palace there, where the vilest orgies were celebrated that alienated the minds of the people from him.

Notice how "the orgies in" is in parentheses. This is because "orgies" is a translator-supplied word; it does not appear in the original text.

Unfortunately, there are newer books that reproduce Legge's translation with the parentheses removed. For example, Andrea and Overfield's The Human Record: Sources of Global History, Volume I (Eighth Edition) has the following on Page 31 through 32:

But their descendant did not follow their example, and great Heaven sent down calamities, employing the agency of our ruler² who was in possession of its favoring appointment. The attack on Xia may be traced to the orgies in Ming Tiao.³

¹ Zheng Tang, founder of the Shang Dynasty, who was supposedly enthroned in 1766 B.C.E.

² Zheng Tang (see note 1).

³ According to legend, Jie, the last Xia king, held notorious orgies at Ming Tiao.

So, what has likely happened, is that John Green and his writers have based their script on one of these newer, unparenthesised versions of the Legge (1879) translation, and in doing so, completely (but understandably) missed the fact that "orgies" does not appear in the original text.

Legge (1865)

The above 1879 translation is not Legge's first rendering of the Shu King. The Chinese Classics, Vol. III.—Part I, published in 1865 (Hongkong: Printed at the London Missionary Society's Printing Office), is an earlier work that translates "the first parts of the Shoo-King" among other texts.

On Page 194 (within portion II), there is the following rendering with extensive commentary:

于其子孫弗率、皇天降災、假手于我有命、造攻自鳴條、朕哉自亳。

But their descendant did not follow their example, and great Heaven sent down calamities, employing the agency of our ruler, who had received its favouring appointment. The attack on Hea may be traced to Ming-tʻëaou, and our attack on it began in Pŏ.

于其子孫,—by 子孫 Këĕ is pre-eminently intended. Perhaps E had other earlier and unworthy sovereigns in his mind as well, but Këĕ was the impersonation of all the wickedness of Hea. 于='in the case of.'

皇天降災,—Lin Che-kʻe illustrates this by saying that 'the spirits of the hills and rivers could no longer be in tranquillity. Hills fell; rivers were dried up; strange sounds were emitted. Birds and beasts, fishes and tortoises, no longer followed their nature, and many of them were changed into monstrous and prodigious things.' I quote this, as showing how the Chinese share in the feeling of a sympathy between the course of nature and the character and doings of men, so that 'the whole creation groans' and writhes to be delivered from the curse of human wickedness. 假手于我有命,—'borrowed a hand from our having the appointment.' Lin Che-kʻe expands the clause well:—假手于我商有天命之成湯,使之伐夏救民,以爲天吏.

[Up to this point the paragraph is found, but in a very different form, in the only remaining part of Mih-tsze's Book on 鬼(明鬼篇,下). He gives it as from the 'Books of Shang:'—嗚呼,古者有夏,方未有禍之時,百獸貞蟲,允及飛鳥,莫不比方,矧在人面,胡敢異心,山川鬼神亦莫敢不𡨴,若能共允任,天下之合下土之葆. Mih's text is evidently corrupt; yet he could hardly have the 'Instructions of E,' as we now read them.]

造攻,云云,—compare Mencius, V., Pt. I., vii. 9. There we have 'the palace of Muh' (牧宮) instead of Ming-tʻeaou. But from the Preface, par. 12, we know that Ming-tʻeaou was not far from the cap. of Këĕ. It was there probably that he had the palace of Muh, where his orgies alienated the people from him, and awoke the vengeance of Heaven. [There was another Ming-tʻeaou towards the east, where Shun died, according to Mencius, IV., Pt. II, i, 1.] 'Our attack commenced (哉=始) in Pŏ,'—the meaning is that the virtues of Tʻang, pleasing to both Heaven and men, first displayed in Pŏ, marked him out as the punisher of Këĕ, and the successor to the empire.

In this 1865 rendering, the word "orgies" doesn't even appear in the translator-supplied words (which are printed in italics as per certain editions of the King James Bible). Orgies only get mentioned in the commentary.

Discussion

I have no doubt that James Legge's 1865 commentary and subsequent 1879 supply of the word "orgies" is well-informed by Chinese sources. His list of works consulted is extensive, and I simply do not have the time to look through them all in search of orgies.

Moreover, there are other texts that attribute orgy-like behaviour to Kiet, the final king of Hia. For example:

《列女傳》 describes him as licentious with women, filling his palace with them, and drinking alcohol with them day and night without rest. It describes an incident where, under the influence of the unvirtuous consort/concubine Mot Hee, he constructs a pool of alcohol large enough to ferry a boat, and makes three thousand men drink from it like cattle. The men subsequently become drunk and drown, and Mot Hee laughs at them.
《博物志》 describes an incident where he constructs a "Long-Night Palace" in the midst of a deep valley, in which men and women mingle, and in which he spends a hundred days neglecting his duty to hear matters of state at the royal court.

But the important point is that the original text of the Shu King makes no mention of such orgies.

The commentary 《書經集傳》 by Tsʻai Chʻêm reads the two place names as contrasting the wickedness and virtue of the deposed and succeeding kings respectively:

Source text	Target text	Notes
鳴條、夏所宅也。亳、湯所宅也。言造可攻之釁者、由桀積惡於鳴條、而湯德之修、則始於亳都也。	Ming-tʻiao, [was the] place of residence of [the] Hia [Dynasty]. Pok, [was the] place of residence of Tʻang. [It] speaketh [that the] commencing provocation of attackability, followeth [from] Kiet's accumulation of evil in Ming-tʻiao; but [the] cultivation of Tʻang's virtue, [did] begin in [the] capital Pok.

But even in this reading, there is no mention of what the wickedness wrought in Ming-tʻiao actually was. Again, the point is that the Shu King does not mention orgies.

Summary

To conclude, when John Green says "The Shujing is pretty specific" in relation to orgies, he is incorrect.

On the other hand, when he says "the Shujing is woefully short on details of these orgies", he is correct — in the sense that there is no mention of orgies at all.

Cite this page

Conway (2025). On John Green's orgies in Ming-tʻiao. <https://yawnoc.github.io/lit/orgies-ming-tiao> Accessed yyyy-mm-dd.