This study investigates the diachronic developments of 2749 instances of shang in historical texts from Chinese corpora. We use Tyler and Evans (2003)’s Principled Polysemy Model to test the various senses associated with shang. It has been shown that there are close relations between the semantic change and polysemy of Chinese spatial word shang in which new meanings of shang occurred based on existing meanings and both old and newer meanings can coexist for a long period of time. Our research also displays how spatial concepts are coded linguistically by Chinese speakers based on various mechanisms including conceptual metaphor, invited inference, constructional change, causative morphology and word-class shift. By displaying the way shang ‘above’ evolved throughout the history of written Chinese to result in the current polysemy network, this study contributes to studies on semantic change in Chinese and reveals why we use spatial words as the way we do.