An expression’s meaning depends on both the objective situations being described and the specific ways that the situations or ‘scenes’ are construed (Langacker, 1987). Construal is our ability to conceptualize and describe the same situation in alternate ways (Langacker, 2015, p. 120). However, each construal factor, classified by Langacker (2015) as prominence, dynamicity, selection, perspective and imagination, has complex properties and these factors often interact in particular usage events. Based on instances extracted from historical corpora of Chinese language, this study applies the various construal operations to the diachronic development of a locative word shang ‘above’ in Chinese. We demonstrate that although there are overlaps, each construal element performs a unique role on the development of shang in its meanings and grammatical functions. It is evident that the particular set of developments for shang would not occur if there were just one construal factor. Our study sheds light on the history of Chinese language, the nature of semantic change and grammaticalization, and also on the relations between spatial language and cognition.