Shangdi (上帝), meaning "Lord-on-High," is the ancient Chinese supreme deity, particularly prominent in the Shang Dynasty (c. 1600–1046 BCE), controlling fate, harvests, and weather, and later becoming conflated with the concept of Heaven (Tian) in Zhou theology. Worshiped as a powerful, distant, omnipotent force, only the Shang emperors and their ancestors could directly communicate with Shangdi through rituals, though the term also refers to modern geographic places in Beijing