Divine and sacred kingship has long been a central topic in social anthropology. However, previous studies have tended to focus on kingship in small-scale societies, emphasizing the internal dilemmas posed by the pursuit of divinity and sacredness, while paying less attention to kingship systems in large-scale and highly stratified polities. In contemporary Chinese sociology, a major concern lies in exploring the foundations of classical Chinese order through the analytical lens of jia (family/kinship/home) in order to construct an ontology situated within Chinese civilization. Yet such an approach often overlooks the entanglement between kinship and other social facts in concrete historical contexts. Similarly, existing scholarship on Late Shang society and kingship generally treats kinship as a self-evident social fact and regards kingship as a derivative construction emerging upon it.To address these gaps, this paper adopts the Durkheimian concept of "collective representations of death" to unveil the divine foundations of Late Shang kingship, thereby extending the scope of kingship theory and reflecting on the methodological limits of the jia-centered approach. It argues that, in the particular historical formation of the Late Shang, kinship --through which kingship was manifested and represented --was organized around the collective representation of death, and was, in turn, shaped by the logic of kingship itself.Specifically, the paper argues that: (1) rites of passage transformed the deceased into transcendent beings inhabiting different realms, forming the basis for social exchange between the living and the dead; (2) the living frequently commemorated significant ancestors to obtain blessings while gradually forget others, forming complex gift exchange systems between the living and the dead. The supernatural capacities of the dead, as well as the qualifications of the living to communicate with them, were highly unequal: only the king, through the mediation of exalted ancestors, could indirectly commune with the supreme deity; (3) human sacrifice served as an important offering in royal commemoration of the dead. As a "non-normative" form of death, it symbolized the annihilation of the humanity of members belonging to rival polities.Thus, the core structure of Late Shang kingship consisted of an ancestral sequence ascending from the reigning king to the supreme deity, while its boundary was defined by the denial of humanity to those outside the political order of the kingdom. In both its vertical and horizontal dimensions, this configuration resolved the dilemmas of regicide and externality that have long troubled anthropological theories of divine and sacred kingship. The vertical construction of kinship order was, in fact, closely linked to the royal pursuit of the sublime; its highly developed form was parasitic upon that pursuit. That is to say, the entanglement between death, kinship, and kingship yields theoretical significance no less profound than that of jia/kinship itself.The Late Shang emphasis on death and ancestry laid the foundation for the dynastic orders of later periods. Yet its hierarchical, utilitarian, and exclusionary characteristics were precisely what the Western Zhou ideal sought to overcome. The dialectical relationship between the Shang and the Zhou thus constitutes a deep-lying structure in the development of Chinese civilization.
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