Read: 2025-11-22
Recommend: 8/10
It’s fascinating to learn about Wu’s efforts to promote gender equality, as well as Taizong’s practical and unsuperstitious approach.
Here are some text that I highlighted in the book:
The life of Empress Wu presents considerable trouble for the historian. It is difficult enough to separate truth from fiction in medieval biographies; all the more so when the subject herself pursued a deliberate policy of disinformation. Almost all sources for early Tang dynasty court history are official documents, subject to many hidden agendas–one must constantly read between the lines, and the lies. The documents pertaining to Wu’s own reign were compiled relatively soon after her death, by a nephew with a reputation for editorial meddling, who was subsequently murdered in a palace coup. His version of events was later rewritten under the authority of Wu’s grandson, whose own mother had supposedly been a victim of one of Wu’s purges. Consequently, the Tang dynasty boasts two dynastic records, the Old Book of Tang (Jiu Tang Shu) and the New Book of Tang (Xin Tang Shu), which sometimes do not agree on the motives and behaviour of major figures.
She was smart. Little trustworthy information survives about her early years–one of the sole surviving anecdotes is a pompous and arch tale of youthful naivety. But by the time she was in her thirties, this formerly doomed concubine had somehow seized the reins of power. If her detractors are to be believed, she used her second husband’s incapacitation through illness to rule the empire in his name–an accusation that carries within it the seeds of further scandal. For, although Wu is ridiculed and pilloried in the histories for some of her own behaviour in old age, if she truly were the power behind the throne in the 660s, as her enemies claim, then she should also be held partly responsible for one of the pinnacles of Tang culture.
Confucianism highlighted a natural order of things, a conservative patriarchy in which children obeyed parents, wives obeyed husbands, the young obeyed the old, and subjects obeyed rulers. If everything went according to such order, the world would be a harmonious place and the universe would prosper.
In the aftermath of the incident at the Gate of the Dark Warrior, the 27-year-old Taizong ‘persuaded’ his father to step down, and took his place. His accession ushered in one of the high points of imperial civilisation. This was no remote and out-of-touch ruler. Taizong knew China well because he had personally fought over every inch of it. He set no store by omens and portents, refusing to let ministers filibuster him with talk of feng shui and inauspicious days. Instead, he insisted that every arm of his government should have representatives that slept in shifts in an annex of the palace, in order to ensure that a relevant minister would be on call at any time of the day or night, regardless of whether a soothsayer regarded the hour as ‘unlucky’. Taizong had refused all talk of moving ceremonies to more fortunate hours and days, insisting that things be done as and when they were most quickly accomplished. Some ministers and subjects regarded his behaviour as a breath of fresh air; others fretted that the Emperor’s hubris would reap its just rewards.
It was thus a matter of great surprise to all concerned, and of supreme triumph for Wu, when Li Zhi was finally called upon to answer, and left with no choice but to say something. Instead of supporting the wise counsel of his fellow elder statesmen, Li Zhi dismissed Gaozong’s impasse with a ministerial shrug. ‘This is a family matter,’ he said. ‘Others should not interfere.’ The phrasing may seem lacklustre and everyday, but its very blandness was a crucial moment in the debate. All previous debate had centred on theory and politics–matters of statehood, of succession and propriety. But Li Zhi’s comments deflated much of the earlier big issues, rendering them pointless and overdramatic. The Emperor, he argued, was indeed the head of an important family, but his private affairs were no concern of the public. It was a disingenuous and misleading argument. Nor was it necessarily a sign of Li Zhi’s support for Wu–it is much more likely that he knew Gaozong was capricious, and saw no need to make a stand on such an issue when any concubine was always subject to the threat of replacement by a younger model. Considering the official duties of an empress and the power she and her relatives could wield, it was most certainly not an issue to be taken lightly. There was nothing, in theory, to stop an emperor spending as much time as he wanted with a particular bedmate, but that in itself was no need to promote her to an official position. But Li Zhi was a powerful-enough figure in the government for his words to form a reasonable alternative to the other elder statesmen’s protestations. Before long, some of the younger advisers were jumping on the bandwagon.
Wu now enjoyed a set of references bordering on the saintly, with a public image that made her sound like the perfect empress, and even compared her favourably with Gaozong’s late lamented mother. Even those who had opposed her were now forced to acknowledge her as the chief wife of their emperor, the first lady of China. Within a few days, she began her revenge.
The nature of Gaozong’s disability in the 660s is unclear. He does not appear to have lost the power of speech, nor his sexual potency, since Wu would bear him two more children, a boy in 662 and a girl around 664. However, Gaozong came to rely heavily on Wu in the early 660s, as she became the conduit through which all court documents passed. No proposal or memorial would be ‘read’ by Gaozong unless Wu had read it to him, giving her supreme control over the information he had when he made his decisions. Gaozong still had the last word, but Wu controlled every syllable of his vocabulary.
manuals available to Chinese couples since ancient times, the prim attitude of Wu’s critics seems strange. There is a suggestion, at least partly supported by later catalogues of Tang erotica, that Wu may have enjoyed sharing her husband with other women. She is alleged to be the central figure in an erotic illustration, now lost, depicting an emperor having sex with a woman who is supported and assisted by two serving-girls. A note to the picture suggests it is a ‘secret dalliance’ (bixi), known only to the inhabitants of the Emperor’s harem, but it does seem remarkably tame to induce such scandal. Emperors had, after all, been enjoying sex with multiple partners for centuries, and bisexuality was no surprise among the lonely women of the harems of many dynasties.
Wu’s stance on the ceremony had other implications. Just as the Emperor had male assistants for his part of the rituals, Wu required women to act as her servants. Celebrants were hastily drafted from the entourages of other attendees, the wives of ambassadors and the Emperor’s serving girls. As the Emperor’s part of the ceremony finished, the menfolk were obliged to clear the mountain, and forced to watch from a distance. Eunuchs carrying parasols and long silk screens walked on either side of the women–whether for modesty or to protect them from the elements is unclear. The women then commenced the Earth ritual of the Feng-Shan sacrifice, offering food and wine in a ceremonial banquet. As their singing voices carried across the base of Mount Tai, those out of earshot of the Emperor voiced their deep disapproval. This was, by its very nature, one of the most important religious ceremonies in the history of the world, and Wu had hijacked it.
It is in the ninth decree that we see the first flowering of what later writers would sometimes term Wu’s ‘feminism’. The deceptively simple announcement calls for the mourning time for a mother to be the same as that for a father. Confucian tradition held that the death of a father should lead to a three-year period of mourning, the effects of which varied depending on the wealth of the bereaved. Some might take it as an order to wear appropriate mourning clothes for the period, others to abstain from luxuries. In some echelons of the imperial service, a ‘mourning period’ was more like a career break, taken by middle-aged ministers with some sense of relief and often adjudged to begin in the year of the death and end on New Year’s Day on the second year afterwards–effectively making ‘three years’ last anything from thirteen months to just over twenty-four. Now, ‘three years’ after the death of her own mother, Wu argued for female parents to receive similar respect from their children. This may have been an attempt retroactively to excuse unrecorded strange behaviour from Wu for the last few seasons, or even to excuse a temporary absence from politics, although the latter seems unlikely–Wu was not the sort of regent to delegate. It may have been a genuine mark of respect to her mother, but, whatever Wu’s reason, the decree was a further step towards establishing a concept that would have been alien to the medieval world–equal rights for women.
It may have been easy, in 684 almost as much as today, for Wu’s critics to forget how precarious the founding of the Tang dynasty had been. The rule of China had been snatched from the previous dynasty by a civil war, the new emperor deposed by his own son, Taizong, who murdered the rightful heir and seized the throne for himself. Wu may have exploited Gaozong’s illness, but one might argue that, if she had not done so, someone else could have with far less harmonious results. Thirteen hundred years after the events, all we have to go on are the insinuations of Wu’s successors, and the stories told about her by the children and grandchildren who despised and feared her. The evidence is so thick with lies, some admittedly created by Wu herself, that it is almost impossible to discern which interpretation of these events is the most valid.
Wu’s great urn flung open the doors of government–ostensibly making it possible for commoners to advance to great heights, limited only by their own abilities. In practice, it created a climate of fear, in which no official was safe from anonymous sniping. Nor was Wu’s policy limited to the environs of the capital city. Concerned about possible rebel action fomenting in the distant south, she soon reformed the rules for informers, obligating provincial officials to transport anyone with interesting information to the capital. In theory, it meant that every subject in the empire had access to the great urn. In effect, local governors, fearful of the implications if they were found to have dismissed information on a conspiracy that was later found to be true, shipped every crackpot, snitch and sneak in China to Luoyang, creating a new subgroup in administration that came to be known as the ‘cruel clerks’.
One of Wu’s ministers complained in 689: ‘All year, I have seen secret denunciations in every corner. We imprison men by the ten thousand, and most are still denounced for their participation in [the rebellion]. But on close analysis, less than one percent of the accusations are true.’ Wu’s bronze urn might have encouraged openness, but was no less open to corruption than the old system of nepotism and patronage. Subjects with nothing to offer except slanderous accusations might inveigle their way into the government, and then naturally gravitate towards the job they did best–in fact, the only job for which they were qualified–searching for more corruption. The surviving aristocrats and bureaucrats were crowded out in the late 680s by commoners, many of whom doubtless performed long, anonymous and worthy service to Wu’s administration. The celebrities of this era, however, are men like Zhou Xing and Lai Chunchen, embittered investigators for the Office of Prosecution who were determined to root out evil-doers and, where evil was in short supply, to bully innocent victims into confessing. In particular, Lai Chunchen, who would later write the ominously titled investigation manual The Classic of Entrapment, bore intense resentment for the gentry of old and took great pleasure in engineering their downfall.
The statue is an image of Xuanzang (c. 602-64), sometimes honoured with the holy name Tripitaka, a devout Buddhist who travelled far to the west and returned with holy scrolls from the birthplace of Buddha himself. He is a saint in the Buddhist tradition, a man who defied Emperor Taizong for the sake of his religious beliefs, and returned from more than a decade of travels to be feted as a religious hero. As a local celebrity and a Buddhist sage, Tripitaka met the famous leaders of his day. He diplomatically turned down posts in Taizong’s government in 645 and 648, and personally gave the Emperor copies of some of his translations, which entertained the dying emperor on his sickbed–when a teenage Wu would have been in attendance.
It is likely that Tripitaka met Wu in the 650s if not before, and may have been an associate of Wu’s late mother, who devoted herself to so many good causes. He died long before Wu’s grab for imperial power, and could have had no knowledge of the uses to which Empress Wu would put his life’s work and teaching. It is highly unlikely that he would have approved. Tripitaka was a man of heartfelt religious conviction, but in the 680s his teachings would be stolen by a former make-up salesman as part of Wu’s project for power. Although Buddhist tradition was not native to China, Buddhist beliefs had gained great influence among the population. Buddhism was another exotic import from along the Silk Road–a religion that offered solace in suffering and the hope of a better life in the next world. Even the imperial court was not immune to it–the emperor was supposedly the high priest of China’s native religion, yet there are many references to Buddhist concepts, even at the imperial court. When the Pure Concubine cursed Wu in 656, threatening to come back as a cat, she did so using fashionable foreign terminology–the concept of reincarnation.
Confucian orthodoxy placed high value on knowing one’s rightful place in society. After a brief experimentation with the Machiavellian intrigues of Legalism at the time of the First Emperor, Chinese governments had returned to the sayings of Confucius, making the works accredited to him the bedrock of political philosophy for 800 years. Confucianism posited a Golden Age in the distant past, a time where gods walked among men, and the world existed in such a state of perfection that everything functioned in perfect harmony. This perfection, it was suggested, had fallen apart because human beings had failed to observe their correct place in nature. Ranks were of crucial importance, as were rituals and behaviour. In her forties, Wu had exploited this obsession with protocol to her own ends, in her argument that she should be permitted to participate in the Feng-Shan sacrifice. Despite the mutterings and complaints of Confucian officials, she had made a forceful and controversial point. Confucian tradition prided itself on its ongoing effort to replicate the Golden Age of ancient times, but there was far more to Wu’s participation than the desire for attention of an imperial wife. Wu’s interference had dragged the radical notion of gender into the Confucian tradition.
Women had a role in Confucian society, but it was one of subordination to men. Wu’s behaviour, particularly at the Feng-Shan sacrifice, suggested that centuries of Confucian scholarship had misread the ancient legends, and that women were, if not actually supreme in times gone past, at least equals of the men. Heaven was only ‘above’ the Earth, after all, in a physical sense–both required sacrifices and rituals of appeasement, and one could not exist without the other.
Now Wu was moving towards an even more radical suggestion, that her many years as an acting ruler should come to an end, and instead be replaced by her elevation to full sovereign powers, not as a regent or consort, but as the actual monarch of all under Heaven. In this assertion she enlisted additional support from an unexpected source–Buddhism.
The problem with standard omens was that they were subject to interpretations by Confucians–a self-sustaining state apparatus of stuffy old men, clinging to traditions set down in half-understood ancient books. Wu saw herself as an innovator, cutting through centuries of ossified tradition, whereas the Confucian scholars saw her as a flighty and dangerous female. It is here, perhaps, that we can see a little of Wu’s motivation for what later generations of Confucian historians have called her ‘reign of terror’. Her infamous urn did not merely serve to introduce gossip and scandal, but it also flooded the court with new appointees who had not, in her eyes, been tainted with the prejudices of a Confucian education.
Perhaps even more excitingly for Wu, followers of Buddhism realised that the original scriptures had been nowhere near as anti-women as the Chinese translators had claimed. For the local, Confucian-influenced audience, translators had finessed the words a little, suggesting that husbands should ‘control’ wives, and wives should ‘revere’ husbands. In fact, the original Sanskrit called for husbands to ‘support’ their wives, and for wives to ‘comfort’ husbands–a view of a far more egalitarian world, and precisely the sort of thing that would give Wu additional leverage.
In 664, the year before Wu exiled her half-brothers, Tripitaka died peacefully of natural causes. In his final words to his followers in the shadow of his great stone pagoda, he advised them: Form is unreal. Perception, thought, action and knowledge–all unreal. The eye, the ear, the mind–all are unreal. Consciousness through the Five Senses is unreal. All the Twelve Causes, from ignorance to Old Age and Death, are unreal. Enlightenment is unreal. Unreality itself is unreal . . . Praise to Maitreya . . . who shall achieve Buddhahood. May I and all conscious creatures soon behold him.
Even many of those who had supported Wu in the past disapproved of her latest activities. One vice-minister commented that Wu had successfully removed the incompetent Zhongzong, and that Ruizong seemed perfectly able to govern without his mother’s help. He therefore wondered what possible reason there could be to have a regent at all. Although he made these comments in private, news soon got back to Wu, and, before long, the unfortunate minister became the subject of counter-accusations. Overnight, he went from being a trusted servant of the Empress to someone charged with both taking bribes and improper conduct with someone else’s concubine. The minister worked in the office that promulgated Wu’s decrees, and was thus considerably surprised to find that a proclamation of his guilt had somehow flown over his head and into the public domain. Ruizong himself came out of seclusion to plead for the minister’s acquittal–but, for the first time, trumped-up evidence from the regent was found to have greater sway over the law than the word of the Emperor himself.
Other changes were designed to save the blushes of the population–it was considered rude to use the personal name of a sovereign in everyday correspondence, and Wu’s name was, for want of a better word, rather common. Wu found a way around this by simply insisting that her name be written with a different character henceforth–essentially, she created a new and previously unused character, and then banned its use, allowing the old version to continue to be used in daily life. Her given name of Zhao, ‘bright’, was in everyday use. She came up with a new way of writing it, combining the characters for ‘brilliant’ and ‘void’. This was now her personal name, an image of enlightenment streaming down into emptiness.
Wu refused again, since China already had an emperor in the form of Ruizong, and there was no real need to take over. Matters now fell to Ruizong himself, the luckless individual who had supposedly ruled China for the previous six years. Miraculously still alive, despite being the figurehead of several attempts at loyalist restoration, Ruizong knew what he needed to do to keep breathing. He petitioned his mother himself, announcing that, in his imperial wisdom, he had decided that it was time for him to abdicate. There was no fighting fate or preventing prophecy–destiny clearly intended that Wu should be the mistress of the world. Seers had foretold that the advent of a living goddess would usher in an age of divine prosperity, and she was the one. With carefully orchestrated reluctance and humility, Wu accepted his offer.
Throughout several preceding centuries, no dynasty had managed to maintain hold on China for more than a couple of generations. The problem, seemingly doomed to eternal repetition, was that rebels would supplant an incompetent dynasty, only to struggle to establish their legitimacy and nobility. In the process of doing so, they would soon be tempted into the usual traps–dynastic alliances with powerful aristocratic families, who would soon begin to exert power from behind the throne. Early meritocracies, valuing loyalty and competence would be crowded out by nepotism and sinecures, until the rot set in. For those who are prepared to accept this view, Wu’s behaviour can be read as an attempt to break this cycle. In founding the Tang dynasty, Taizong and his father had snatched power from their ineffectual cousins. But already by the time of Gaozong, the old aristocracies were exerting their influence. Gaozong, after all, had a mother from the old aristocratic Zhangsun family, and Wu herself had a mother who had prided herself on her family connections to the departed Sui. But, with her seizure of power from her sons, Wu may have seen herself as stopping the corruption in its tracks. Zhongzong, in thrall to his wife and inlaws, had been packed off into exile. Ruizong, unable to stand up for himself, had been gagged, and now was forbidden from holding meetings with any court official. Meanwhile, Wu’s reforms, despite the obvious and manifold abuses to which they had been put, also cut out much dead wood from the administration. Official postings were increased in number, but their terms decreased in length, presumably in order to prevent incumbents from growing complacent and forming inappropriate associations. Wu continually exercised her imperial prerogative to hire and fire, promote and demote her ministers–such that 80 per cent of her officials ended their careers in either dismissal or demotion, compared to 33 per cent similarly ousted during the reign of Taizong. But, while antagonistic historians have seen this as a sign of Wu’s addled caprices, her defenders have claimed that she introduced a dynamic system of balances on the abuse of power.
Despite the opprobrium heaped upon her by later generations, Wu was an incredibly popular ruler with the common people. Her detractors, of course, would say that nobody was left alive who opposed her. While she did spend a lot of public money on extravagances like the Hall of Illumination and its replacement, there appears to have been more public money around. China was prospering, the Silk Road was bringing in massive trade opportunities in the west and Wu’s tax office was reaping the benefits. Unlike other legendary big spenders, such as the ancient First Emperor, who taxed his subjects into oblivion for the sake of his public works, Wu’s big projects seemed easily funded by the increase in revenue. In fact, in 695, Wu even granted the entire empire a completely tax-free year.
The Zhang brothers were just the first and most famous of a string of attractive young boys who formed Wu’s entourage in her later years. Some complained that the Office of the Crane, far from being a legitimate department of medical enquiry, was merely a sinecure post designed to smuggle a series of beautiful young boys into the palace for Empress Wu’s entertainment. Matters reached the point where officials began to recommend family members for appointment on new criteria, not of knowledge of the Confucian classics or mastery of the law, but of the pallor of the skin and the fine lines of their profiles. One minister was even heard to boast that he was far better endowed in both size and stamina than either the late Xue Huaiyi or the Zhang brothers, and that consequently he hoped the Empress would promote him to her inner circle.
Nobody would have thought twice about a similar set-up for a male emperor in his seventies. In fact, old emperors were encouraged to spend their time with a variety of fresh young concubines, spiritually feeding on their yin essence in order to prolong their lives. Wu herself had begun her career as one of several hundred imperial concubines–it had been her duty to pleasure the Emperor in any way he required, in order to preserve the harmony of the palace. Since Wu was now the sovereign, it was only natural that she would seek to behave in a similar fashion, which would logically involve multiple exposures to male yang essence. In the absence of any other immortality treatments, Empress Wu craved orgasms and semen, and the more she got, the longer she would stay alive. If the Office of the Crane was a smokescreen to hide dozens of male concubines from the public eye, the only real mystery was why Wu felt the need to hide them at all.
Possibly, Wu’s interest in her young boys was wholly innocent–an old, rich lady’s wish to spend her time with handsome men, waiting on her every need, laughing at her jokes, bringing her fine foods and wines, and letting her win at games. But even in that regard, was she really any different from the many emperors of Chinese history? For a man in a position of supreme power, multiple sexual partners were a perk of the job. The Confucians may have begrudged Wu her attendants, but they also begrudged her very presence as ruler and empress.
Wu even made some limited efforts to curb corruption in the Buddhist monasteries, many of which still retained sinecure positions and tax-dodging appointees. Despite her status of a living god, she began to lose interest in Buddhism, perhaps because of her own guilty conscience surrounding how she might be treated in the afterlife. Accordingly, she began to develop a greater interest in Daoism, with its emphasis not on reincarnation, but on immortality–Wu seems to have decided not to take her chances with reincarnation, not after all the deaths she had caused.
As death approached, Wu put her house in order. She wrote a will in which she revoked her divine status, going so far as to reject the posthumous title of huangdi. She preferred, instead, to be buried with her beloved Gaozong, and to be remembered not as Wu the living goddess, not even as Wu the ‘female emperor’, but simply as Gaozong’s loyal wife. Just in case it did her any good in the afterlife, she also pardoned some of those she had wronged–including several ministers and the two women she had had dismembered and drowned.
Does this mean that Wu was blameless for many of the crimes that later generations would pin on her? In her last days, presumably with nothing to lose, she does not seem to have believed that she was responsible. Others may have committed terrible crimes in her name, but her list of regrets was remarkably short. Sometimes, when discussing Empress Wu, the historian is apt to worry that he is starting to sound like one who is denying the Holocaust. Wu herself believed that, while she may have been indirectly responsible for the deaths of many thousands in border conflicts and famines, these were the collateral damage of any political career. When faced with the opportunity to ask for forgiveness, she appears to have acknowledged responsibility in only a handful of cases–is this a sign of the self-delusion that appears to have confused her in advanced old age, or was that always her belief? Wu undoubtedly made mistakes. Undeniably, she was ruthlessly ambitious; faced with a life of virtual imprisonment in an obscure convent, or the luxuries and diversions of life as the nominal ruler of the entire world, she made her choice and did what she thought she had to do. Life was cheap in the Tang court, and there is no reason not to suspect that Wu’s own life was held in similarly low regard by her enemies. Was it kill or be killed? Sometimes, yes.