Wu Zetian – The Woman Who Became Emperor

A woman ruling China. The mere thought of it flew in the face of Confucian fuddie-duddies and their “Mandate of Heaven” nonsense. Nonsense, because men rule wisely not by virtue of their male parts but in spite of them. Yet the thought of a woman holding sway over the Han was tantamount to heresy for traditional Chinese, even after 1949. Amazing that one actually managed to seize the reins of power, albeit a woman of brains, beauty, and more ambition than Macbeth after an Amway convention. Her name was Wu Zetian, and she still lives in infamy for doing everything men did for power, except better.

Even in China’s golden age, the Tang Dynasty, being born rich didn’t mean a life of dignity. Not for those with double X chromosomes. Wu Zetian’s father was from the noble Sui clan, and an original supporter of reigning emperor Taizong. He schooled his daughter in history and literature, a rare indulgence. But education and a pedigree were small charms next to Wu Zetian’s attractiveness, great enough that Taizong heard of it and had her impressed as a concubine of the fifth rank. She was thirteen years old.

Despite her comeliness and intellect, Wu Zetian failed to gain the favor of Taizong, much less to bear him a boy. Thus when the emperor died, she had no choice but to depart with the other childless concubines to a nunnery, consigned to a monastic life at the ripe old age of 24.

However, fate was far from done with Wu Zetian. On the first anniversary of Taizong’s death, his successor Gaozong went to the nunnery’s temple, Gangye, to make an offering. He noted the bald but still ravishing Wu Zetian, and his empress Wang saw him drooling. A cool customer, Wang realized she could use Wu Zetian to distract her husband from a truly dangerous rival, the Consort Xiao, whom he had been spending far too much time with lately. She had Wu Zetian back in the seraglio as soon as her hair had grown out somewhat.

Wang’s plan worked – much too well. Before long not only Consort Xiao but also his wife were a distant second to Wu Zetian for the emperor’s affections. She bore two sons and a daughter to Gaozong, despite the edict that lying with a concubine who had also lain with one’s father was incest. Wang teamed up with her old rival Xiao to dispatch with this new threat. Their combined intent, however, was nothing to Wu Zetian’s all-consuming will to power. She killed her youngest daughter in an elaborate scheme to frame Empress Wang. Gaozong was not persuaded by his wife’s protestations of innocence, leaving her power greatly diminished. Wu Zetian delivered the coup de grace, formal accusations of witchcraft, witnessed by a faction of ministers now loyal to the emperor’s new best girl. Empress Wang and Consort Xiao were both imprisoned, and executed on Wu Zetian’s orders later in the year.

Emperor Gaozong had Wu Zetian’s oldest son made crown prince, relegating Wang’s son to dukedom. This made her tenure as a dowager empress a distinct possibility, and according to Chinese court politics, ten enemies spring up to replace a vanquished one, especially ones vanquished as ruthlessly as Empress Wang and Consort Xiao. In strategic terms, it was a question of quantity versus quality. An army of jealous courtiers and their flunkies were no match for Wu Zetian. Imagine one of those prodigies playing twenty chess games at once, only for life and death stakes, and you have an idea of Wu Zetian’s genius and daring.

It was an ugly game, to be sure, but so always has been the game of power. Wu Zetian instituted her own secret police force, spying, arresting, and colluding to falsely charge any who presented the remotest threat to her ascension. The list of enemies she had executed, banished, or forced to commit suicide is beyond the scope of a light read.

In time, even her benefactor Gaozong grew tired of her domineering. But he was already suffering from prolonged headaches, blurry vision and inability to concentrate. Contemporaries and several historians credit his infirmities to a prolonged poison attack at the hands of Wu Zetian. The charge might seem outlandish were it not for her proclivity for killing rivals thus.

With misgivings, Gaozong began to entrust more and more imperial business to her judgment. The extent of her authority became evident in the year 666, when she offered sacrifices after Gaozong at Mt. Tai, an unprecedented move and a violation of ancient ritual that would have been a death sentence for one less secure in her power.

Wu Zetian was about more than self-glorification, however. In approximately 675 CE, she formally submitted twelve suggestions to her emperor. The Dao De Jing should be read by all imperial exam candidates, and a woman’s death would oblige her children to mourn for three years. Gaozong instituted all her proposals.

He was tottering at this point, and considering installing Wu Zetian as regent. Naturally, a wave of opposition met the idea, all but a few too terrified of his woman to voice any objection. Wu Zetian employed an army of PR agents to aid her cause, literarily-inclined officials who wrote treatises on China’s notable women, guidelines for good citizenship, and teachings for officials that not-so-indirectly praised her, and intimated she should rule. Of course, this new tack didn’t forestall her tried and true methods of false accusation, banishment, and execution.

When Gaozong at last died in 683, Wu Zetian’s son Li Zhe ascended the throne as Emperor Zhongzong. She was now Empress Dowager Wu – as powerful a woman as one in China could hope to be. Indeed, it was not long after Zhongzong began getting carried away with his title that Wu Zetian had him deposed and replaced by her younger son, Li Dan. This new emperor, Ruizong, was not allowed to meet with officials or rule on matters of state. All imperial business was to be decided by Empress Wu.

Not that life was all business for Empress Dowager Wu. It is well-known that she kept a stable of male concubines, and also took up with a famed Buddhist monk named Huaiyi, upon whom she bestowed ever greater honors. If Chinese posterity could forgive her political ambition, it had a much harder time with the sexual turnabout she implemented on achieving it.

By 690, it couldn’t have been plainer that Wu Zetian needed a child-king like a fish needs a bicycle. She had an empire-wide system of copper mailboxes to facilitate her secret police and spying system, maintaining a firm advantage in the royal pastime of backstabbing. She had crushed rebellion after uprising with expediency almost as humiliating to her foes as the fact that the defeats were at the hands of a woman. Her PR department began a wave of petition drives asking her to take the throne, and by the end of the year she graciously acceded, taking the royal name Zhao, and changing the dynasty from Tang to Zhou. She had sole rule over China, something no woman before or since has accomplished.

It shouldn’t surprise that successive generations, right on up to those of the 20^th century, would use Wu Zetian’s name as a synonym for “scheming shrew”. Overweening ambition has always been harder for traditional folk to countenance in a female. But in execution and judgment, she proved a capable ruler indeed. Legendary historian Sima Guang wrote from the Song Dynasty:

“Even though the Empress Dowager excessively used official titles to cause people to submit to her, but if she saw that someone was incompetent, she would immediately depose or even execute him. She grasped the powers of punishment and award, controlled the state, and made her own judgments as to policy decisions. She was observant and had good judgment, so the talented people of the time also were willing to be used by her.”

Having ruled in all but name for decades, Wu Zetian reigned as emperor for another fifteen years, deposed only by death, in 705. That decade and a half in power had met with its challenges, especially from Khitan and Tufan incursions on the northern borders. Nonetheless, the Empress Zhao acquitted herself and her empire admirably. Two major trends sprang from her rule into the re-established Tang Dynasty, the rise of Buddhism over Daoism, and greater equality between the sexes. If her corrupt and ruthless methods are to disqualify her from admiration, then children should be forbidden wanting to become president.

Related posts:

1. The Man Who Would Be Emperor
2. Advice Fit for an Emperor
3. The Yellow Emperor – Man or Myth?

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