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Chinese civilization is over 4000 years old and in that time we have exactly one Empress who ruled in her own name.

How can this be?

European history is comparatively short, but we still have queen regnants in England, Russia, Russia again, Spain, and I could go on.

Chinese culture was regrettably sexist, but they were hardly unique in that. The real difference lies in marriage practices. In Europe, a king was only allowed one official wife, and there was always a very real possibility that the king would not have a suitable son to inherit. And if he had a daughter … well … she might be the best choice.

But in polygamous China the situation was different. If the Empress had no sons, there was nothing to stop the son from a different life from inheriting. In polygamous cultures, the stability of the throne is not usually threatened by the lack of sons, but by the multiplicity of sons. Boys with the chance at absolute power tend to fight amongst themselves. A daughter’s chance of inheriting is so remote, that it doesn’t really happen.

Nor did it happen for Wu Zetian, but she did rule the empire, and this is her story.

A Middle Class Girl in Tang China

Wu was born in 625 CE to a lumber merchant and his second wife. The emperor was Taizong of the Tang dynasty. He had spent his youth fighting wars, forcing his father to abdicate, and fathering fourteen sons, but now his empire enjoyed peace and prosperity. He was getting on in years and grieving for the deaths of his favorite war horses and also his first wife, which is not to say that he didn’t have plenty of other horses, wives, and concubines.

In the grand Chinese tradition, Taizong had an Empress, now deceased, but he also had four auxiliary wives, six second grade wives, nine third grade wives called Elegants, nine fourth grade wives called Beauties, nine fifth grade wives called Talents, plus nine sixth grade wives called Treasures, nine seventh grade wives called Ladies, and finally nine eighth grade wives called Obedients, for a total of sixty-five women living in the exclusive walled inner palace, and that’s not counting the mere concubines.

When the teenage Wu arrived, she was a Talent, which put her above twenty-seven other wives but on par or below thirty-eight others. She was a reputed beauty, but that was still no guarantee the emperor would even notice her amid such a crowd. Her actual work assignment was to change the emperor’s sheets. We have no record of whether Wu ever did anything more for Taizong than make the bed, and she might have remained a chambermaid except that the Crown Prince was caught in a conspiracy at the same time that his brother was caught in a completely unrelated conspiracy, and in the ensuing uproar Taizong had a huge swath of the palace executed or banished, including most of the women who outranked Wu. Instant promotion!

With the previous heir out of the way the new heir to the throne was Gaozong, who had grown up in pampered luxury but without the expectation of ever inheriting the throne. One of his pampered luxuries was that contrary to custom, he had never actually been thrown out of the inner palace when he exited childhood, so he probably had met the beautiful Wu, who was only a little older than he was. As his father aged and sickened, Gaozong sat by his side, and the maid assigned to help him with the nursing duties was none other than our own Wu,

A great many folk tales have been told about the exact nature of the relationship between Wu and Gaozong, but it is generally accepted that they were intimate before Taizong died. According to Confucian precepts that relationship was technically incestuous. Wu was, because of her marriage, technically one of Gaozong’s sixty-five mothers-in-law. (And you thought your family get-togethers were awkward…) This is just the first of many scandals to cling to Wu. The fact that Gaozong was married (multiple times) was apparently completely irrelevant.

Upon an emperor’s death, all court ladies who had not borne children were expected to shave their heads and enter a Buddhist monastery. Now if you ask me, a quiet life in the countryside and a Buddhist monastery might be preferable to the kind of intrigues that go on inside the court. But Wu is not reported to have felt this way about it. It was banishment and if the sick bed dalliance had been a play in the hope that Gaozong would save her, she was disappointed. She went to the Ganye convent along with all the others, but if she wanted to return to the palace, she soon found that she had a totally unexpected ally.

Return to the Palace

The new Empress Wang, as Gaozong’s first wife, had an ongoing feud with Xiao Liangdi, one of the four auxiliary wives. The Empress felt that any night the emperor did not spend with Xiao Liangdi was a point won. And it was actually the Empress herself who suggested that Wu come back to the palace. So back Wu came, and according to folklore, her hair magic regrew so that her beauty returned. (Sounds like a wig to me.)

In this period, Wu presented Gaozong with three, and possibly four, children very quickly. She also made friends among the palace women because she was friendly and generous with the food and trinket Gaozong sent her. Those relationships were to stand her in good stead when Empress Wong realized that her tactics had succeeded as far as marginalizing Xiao Liangdi was concerned. But it did her no good since she had merely replaced one rival with a new rival.

And now we need to pause the family squabble to discuss sources. All historical records are tainted by the motives, bias, memory, and sheer ignorance of the writer. In Wu’s case the record is particularly shady. She definitely engaged in misinformation campaigns herself. So did her enemies. So did subsequent generations, both those who loved her and, more commonly, those who hated her. The story is murky from here on out.

Empress Wang was required by custom to visit any new child born to the emperor. When Wu had a baby girl, the Empress came when Wu was not in the room, possibly intentionally. According to the Empress’s own account, she picked the baby up, played with her for a few minutes, and then put her down and walked out. When Wu checked in later, her daughter was dead.

Wu’s story was that the Empress strangled the child. Popular myth holds that Wu strangled the girl herself in order to frame the Empress. And some have suggested that possibly the girl died a purely natural causes, but Wu used the occasion to engineer the empress’s downfall. It’s nasty no matter which of those stories is true, and it was the beginning of the end for Empress Wang.

After a series of negotiations, bribes, threats, and actual punishments, Gaozong and Wu convinced the ministers that they had caught the Empress in a plot to poison him. Her supposed co-conspirator was none other than Xiao Liangdi. The former rivals were sentenced to house arrest where they could enjoy each other’s company indefinitely.

In no time at all, a group of ministers hit on a bright idea. Maybe, they said, Wu should be made Empress now. Gaozong agreed immediately. The official proclamation lied about pretty much everything, from Wu’s ancestry to her relationship with Taizong. It even claimed that she had no quarrels or disagreements with other ladies. One can assume the former Empress would disagree.

Empress Wu, Imperial Consort

So Wu became Empress in 655, but only at the side of the emperor and that would not be enough to get her into my series on women who seized power. In English, we use the word empress or queen to mean both a sitting monarch and also the wife of a sitting monarch. Chinese is more specific. The word huangdi is used for the ruler and is usually presumed to be male but is not actually inherently male as far as the language is concerned. The huangdi’s wife is the huangho. So Wu had risen from chambermaid to huangho, but she was not the huangdi. Not yet anyways.

Now ensconced in some power, Wu made her next move. She banished her half-brothers. This was taken as an act of astonishing foresight and forbearance. It would forestall the kind of infighting and blatant corruption so common among the extended family members of court officials. Conveniently, it also got rid of half-brothers Wu had never liked anyway.

Next she had the former Empress and her fellow prisoner whipped, mutilated, and finally left in vats of wine for a lingering death.

Wu’s eldest son was declared the Crown Prince. Some ministers who had argued against her elevation were found to be involved with conspiracy to revolt and banished south. Others were hounded into committing suicide.

Having successfully removed all the old guard, the palace was now filled with ministers who were new, had no loyalty to the old Tang dynasty, and mostly owed their promotion to having supportive Wu’s rise to power.

And where was Gaozong during all of this?

Well, Wu was a healthy, strong-willed woman, and Gaozong was anything but. He was chronically ill, maybe with epilepsy, or perhaps multiple sclerosis. In 660, he took a decided turn for the worse. He needed help with reading official documents and transacting imperial business and Wu, always the supportive wife, was ever so glad to lend a hand.

No one saw the emperor without going through Wu first. No one wrote to him without her knowledge. Nominally he was still in charge, but practically speaking, she was running the empire. And by all accounts she did it capably.

She saw the empire through a successful war with Korea. Relations were established with far-flung lands including the Arabs. The Silk Road was bringing riches into China. Her position naturally created enemies and gave rise to enormous speculation about what did the emperor see in her?

Wu was accused, rightly or wrongly, of all sorts of scandals, and some of them have given rise to 1300 subsequent years of pornography. Only one of those speculations deserves a place here: According to some traditions in Chinese medicine, the sixty-five women hanging around the emperor were not just a perk of the job, but actually essential for his physical health. There’s a whole theory around Yin and Yang and male and female essences and keeping everything in balance. Which means that if Wu had truly and totally captivated Gaozong’s full attention, then perhaps the absolutely shocking and unthinkable relationship between them was what we currently know as monogamy.

Do we really know this? No, but it’s a more interesting theory than most.

So, Wu was running the empire now, and she decided to hold a Feng Shan ceremony. The Feng Shan was a religious ceremony, where the emperor announced his successes to heaven and earth. As such it could only be held at a time when the emperor had enormous successes to announce. It had not been done in 600 years no emperor had felt confident enough to do it.

Wu had confidence in spades.

In 665 the entire court traveled across brand new roads and bridges to the sacred Mount Tai. Witnesses were called from all over the world (by which we mean, all over the world that China cared about). According to tradition, the emperor planned to climb the mountain on foot. At the summit, he would sacrifice at a giant altar. He would ritually bury several jade slabs engraved with his successes, where their bulk would make the sacred mountain a wee bit higher than it had been before the great Tang dynasty.

All this was carefully prepared, witnesses had arrived, proclamations had been made, when Empress Wu came out with just one little objection. According to Wu this great ceremony had always had one serious flaw. The emperor made the sacrifice at the top of the mountain closest to the heaven, and that was all well and good because heaven was masculine. But the other half of the Feng Shan was earth, and earth was feminine. Therefore a sacrifice at the bottom of the mountain had to be carried out by women. It only made sense! And if the feminine earth had been offended when previous dynasties had omitted this necessary part of the ceremony, then it would certainly explain why those dynasties were no longer in power, wouldn’t it? The emperor simply wasn’t qualified to do the job by himself. He needed his wife.

Feminists love this episode! The scholars and religious elites were appalled, but Wu won, and the ceremony went according to her plan. She made herself an equal of the emperor in the most important religious ceremony in China.

As ruler, Wu sponsored literary and educational projects, including the writing of biographies of women. She reduced taxes on silk and agricultural projects. She demobilized the army, though admittedly not until after it conquered Korea. She cut back on nonessential public works and forbade wasteful government spending. She required public mourning time for female relatives to be just as long as those for male relatives. She encouraged subjects to communicate with her by way of an anonymous comments box at the palace. Ostensibly this would cut down on corruption. Unfortunately, it actually just released a veritable flood of accusations and counter-accusations.

The Imperial Widow (aka the Empress Dowager)

All of this makes her sound like a good, well-intentioned ruler and to some extent she may have been, but people who disagreed with her still frequently found themselves dead or exiled. And this included her own son, the heir, and the second son, the next heir. Wu actually favored her youngest and fourth son as heir, but in a rare moment of independent will, Gaozong declared her third son Zhongzong. And then Gaozong died, making Wu an imperial widow for the second time.

The young emperor Zhongzong lost no time in alienating his ministers. When one of them questioned the propriety of giving a high position to his father-in-law, Zhongzong snapped back that he could give his father-in-law the entire empire if he wanted to. He was emperor!

And that was all the opening his mother needed. It was probably just a spiteful comment said in the heat of the moment, but giving away the empire? Toppling the Tang dynasty? Is that not treason?

Wu’s coup was backed by the ministers and palace officials, and so emperor Zhongzong was deposed by his own mother he had ruled for all of six weeks.

And now you’re thinking, at last Wu comes into her own!

But no, she doesn’t declare herself huangdi. She places her youngest son Ruizong on the throne. He’s the one that she wanted to inherit in the first place. Unfortunately, Wu said, Ruizong had a speech impediment. And so, Wu said, he would require her to speak for him. (Awfully convenient.)

Acting as regent again, she made some good reforms: The census was redone. Army officers were to be chosen based on suitability for the job, which sounds awfully reasonable to us, but in fact it was not very common in world history.

She also put down a major rebellion. When she read the proclamation the former minister Li Jingye was using the rally people to his rebellious cause, Wu’s initial reaction was hilarity. Who was his speechwriter? And why did he not work for her? The man was good!

The proclamation lists a number of atrocities Wu had committed, but from a historian’s point of view, it is far more interesting for the atrocities it does not list. It says nothing about drowning Empress Wang in a vat of wine. It says nothing about the demotion of multiple crown princes. Maybe he was ignorant? Maybe he considered all that perfectly normal in a Chinese court? Or maybe those events were never true at all, but they were made up after the fact by Wu’s enemies.

Whatever the truth of it, Li’s rebellion failed.

Wu, however, was not satisfied. Buried in a Buddhist text, one of her friends (which is to say, one of her lovers) found a passage that suggested that Buddha’s next reincarnation would be in the form of a woman. Omens and portents were encouraged, including a three-legged chicken, a chicken that changed gender, and an appearance of Halley’s comet. She held major religious ceremonies in which the emperor played only a supporting role to her. She decreed some changes to the writing system, including a telling one: the Chinese character for nation was replaced by a border surrounding her own surname. She was clearly edging toward proclaiming herself emperor (that is to say, huangdi).

Ruizong was spineless, but not stupid. He took a very prudent, self-preserving step: he abdicated. His mother, he said, was clearly chosen by destiny to rule.

Wu accepted.

Empress Regnant Wu

Wu was in her 60s when she finally began her own reign. In comparison with the first sixty-something years of her life, the fifteen years she ruled as huangdi are tame. She made no new innovations or proclamations, though she did order the flowers to open early one spring. Apparently, they were obedient. Executions, forced suicides, and banishments continued unabated

On the other hand, the empire was at peace, and the economy was good. Wu lived in a lavish court and indulged herself.

Wu was equal to all the rebellions and conspiracies, until one day supporters of Zhongzong pulled off a coup. Zhongzong wasn’t even at the head of his own coup, but he was installed as emperor.

Wu, ill, aging, and defeated at last, went into seclusion. She had ruled China for fifty years, fifteen of them under her own name, and her time was over.

Feminist champions of Wu will be disappointed to hear that in her will she revoked her divine status and her title of Huangdi. She preferred, she said, to be remembered as Gaozong’s loyal wife.

But that isn’t really how she was remembered. Instead, she has gone down in history as a corrupt, scheming, and perverted power grabber. There is obviously some truth to at least some of the accusations. And yet she was hardly the first or last emperor to silence enemies through any means necessary. Remember that she only rose out of her position as a fifth-grade wife because Taizong also purged a huge swaths of his court, which means his very close family relations. He wasn’t kind, and it wasn’t pretty, and yet he went down in history as a great national hero.

Wu behaved in very similar ways, but she wasn’t considered a hero until feminists got hold of the story. Life in the Tang court was vicious and cutthroat both before and after her reign, and there is no doubt that who played the game well.

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Selected Sources

One of many sources was Jonathan Clement’s biography, Wu: The Chinese Empress who schemed, seduced and murdered her way to become a living God.

Despite the provocative title, Clement’s biography is decidedly more sympathetic than many sources, including, for example, the section on Wu in Ann Paludan’s, Chronicle of the Chinese Emperors. English translations of Wu’s own poetry have been somewhat elusive, but you can read three of them on this site.