The Fisherman Who Made a Kingdom

The Fisherman Who Made a Kingdom: Jiang Ziya, the Fall of Shang, and the Founding of Qi Around 1046 BCE, an old man sat on a riverbank with a fishing hook that could catch nothing at all, and waited. He had already spent four decades as a failed butcher, a failed tavern-keeper, a man dismissed by every lord he approached. Within a generation he would help topple a five-century empire, found a state that would endure for nearly eight hundred years, and be worshipped, long after his death, as a god of war.
This is the story of Jiang Ziya: strategist, kingmaker, and founding duke of Qi. It traces his obscure and humiliating early life in the shadow of a decaying Shang court; his recruitment by King Wen of Zhou on the banks of the Wei River; his role in the ransom of a captive king, the conquest at Muye, and the fall of a dynasty; and his transformation of a hostile, agriculturally poor frontier into the wealthiest state of its age.
Along the way, it follows his legend into the Six Secret Teachings of Chinese military philosophy, into the archaeological record recently unearthed in Shandong, and into the sixteenth-century novel that made him a god. A sweeping narrative of merit, patience, and power, and of what a civilization gains when it finally learns to recognise the talent it has spent a lifetime overlooking.