The Shang document opens with a scene, not a plan: 'Pan Geng moved to Yin, and the people did not find the place livable. He called together the elders and they spoke their complaints.' Then: 'The king ordered the multitude, and all came to the courtyard. The king spoke thus: Come, you multitude; I will announce my instruction to you.' What survives is a quarrel about moving house.

Five capitals

The king's first argument is the past: 'The former kings had their service, and reverently honoured Heaven's command; yet even so they were not always at peace, and did not keep to one city — to this day there have been five capitals' (于今五邦). The phrase is his own, and it counts capitals, not moves; where those five were, this speech does not say. It is a king citing his own house's record, not an annalist counting capitals.

The Shiji tells the same event in another key: 'In the time of Pan Geng, Yin was already capital north of the River; Pan Geng crossed south of the River and again dwelt in Cheng Tang's old home, and so moved five times, with no fixed place. The people of Yin all complained and did not wish to move.' Its destination is Cheng Tang's old home, and later in the same passage, Bo; the Shang document says he moved to Yin. The two do not agree, and this piece does not reconcile them.

Nor does either book list the five. The Shiji mentions earlier moves elsewhere — Zhong Ding moved to Ao, He Dan Jia lived at Xiang, Zu Yi moved to Xing — and says that 'from Qi to Tang there were eight moves'; but none of these is the list behind Pan Geng's 'five capitals'. Later commentators arrange the five differently. This piece records the two phrases, 五邦 and 五迁, and does not sew them into one route.

Three speeches

The Shang documents have three Pan Geng pieces, upper, middle and lower. Who wrote them and when is already a disagreement. The Book Preface says that when Pan Geng had moved five times and was about to rule at Bo-Yin, the people complained, and so the three pieces were made — as if on the occasion. The Shiji says something else: after Pan Geng died and his brother took the throne, 'the Yin way declined again; the people thought of Pan Geng, and thereupon made the three Pan Geng pieces' — after his death. So they cannot be read as a verbatim record of what the king said on the day. This piece quotes only the upper piece; the middle and lower pieces are separate speeches and are not used here.

The upper piece is a set of arguments. It begins from history (the five capitals), then works in images: a fallen tree that puts out new shoots; 'when the net is on the main cord, it is ordered and not tangled'; 'when the farmer works his fields with strength, only then does he have an autumn'. It borrows a saying of Chi Ren: 'Men seek the old; vessels do not seek the old, only the new.' It ends with rewards and penalties: 'Near or far, by guilt strike the doomed, by virtue make the good known. If the state is good, it is you, the multitude; if the state is not good, it is I alone who bear the fault.' And it turns on rumour: 'Why did you not tell me, instead of stirring the crowd with floating words? If fire blazes on the plain, so that one cannot come near it, can it still be put out?'

What the move was

About the move itself both books are thin. The process is one phrase — 'he crossed south of the River'. The result is the Shiji's: 'he ruled at Bo, followed Tang's government, and thereafter the people were at peace and the Yin way revived; the lords came to court.' No route, no numbers, no description of the city, and no record of a plan drawn before building. What is visible is a crossing, a complaint, a speech, and an outcome later written as revival.

The logic of the speech deserves a line of its own. It uses 'we have moved five times already' to justify moving again, calls the new capital the place where Heaven will prolong the dynasty, presents obedience as harvest, and finally takes the blame on the king himself. This is the craft of persuasion, not an administrative order: what Pan Geng needed was not a city plan but a people willing to go. No plan survives in the text because the thing being negotiated was not the plan.

What is missing

List the gaps: no layout, walls, streets or palaces; no population, distance or dates; no list of the five capitals; and the question whether the three speeches are contemporary with Pan Geng is disputed, so this piece does not settle it. There is also the relation between the two books: the Shang document is a transmitted speech text, while the Shiji is a Western Han narrative that adds the claim that the speeches were made after Pan Geng's death. They are not simple paraphrase, and so the Shiji's Bo and the document's Yin cannot be stitched into one place-name.

So 'Pan Geng moved the capital' comes down to two sentences: a king says there have already been five capitals and there must be one more; a people complain and do not want to go; and three speeches survive that argue, compare, promise and threaten, and end by saying where the responsibility for a good or bad state lies. How the new capital was laid out, how many went, how long the road took — the sources do not answer.

How to read it

Read as 'Shang city planning', it gives nothing. Read as political persuasion, it is full: the history of the former kings, the tree, the net, the farmer, Chi Ren's maxim, the line between reward and punishment, the warning against rumour, the assignment of blame. These are the techniques of the speech, and a sample of how royal power explained a great move to the people it moved. That is what the text is evidence for: the explaining, not the building. What the two pages leave is the argument about a move: five capitals already, and one more; a king saying the fallen tree will sprout, a people saying the place is unlivable; and a later historian saying that after the move the Yin way revived. The city is not preserved. The argument is. Pan Geng's move entered history not with a map but with a speech.

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Sources & further reading

  1. 《尚书·盘庚上》（今文尚书；维基文库本，未与点校本复核） — A transmitted speech in the Shang documents. It opens with Pan Geng moving to Yin and the people finding the place unlivable; the king summons the crowd to the court and argues with them. His arguments include the past: the former kings did not keep to one city, 'and to this day there have been five capitals' (于今五邦); a dead tree that sprouts (若颠木之有由蘖); 'if the net is on the main cord, it is ordered and not tangled'; the saying of Chi Ren, 'men seek the old; vessels do not seek the old, only the new'; threats of punishment and promises of reward; and a warning against spreading rumours, compared to a fire in the grassland. The text does not list the five capitals and gives no plan, route, population or date. Two companion speeches, Pan Geng zhong and xia, are not quoted here.
  2. 司马迁《史记》卷三·殷本纪（西汉；维基文库本，未与点校本复核） — A Western Han narrative. It says that in Pan Geng's time Yin was already north of the Yellow River, that Pan Geng crossed south and returned to Cheng Tang's old home, 'and so moved five times, with no fixed place'; the people complained and did not want to go; he addressed the nobles and ministers, crossed the river, ruled at Bo, followed Tang's government, and 'the people were at peace and the Yin way revived'. It also says that after Pan Geng's death, when the people thought of him, 'the three Pan Geng pieces were made' — i.e. after his death. The chapter gives no five-capital list, no city plan and no dates.