Empress Wu Zhao

The culture and society of seventh-century China may seem exotic and unfamiliar, its glories, wonders and technologies beyond compare with contemporary Europe. But in that immense state, where steppe nomad and Confucian sage, peasant, warrior and courtier were bound together by the god-like authority of the emperor, one instantly recognises a familiar set of rules by which men and women achieved, maintained and lost political power.

Huagu, ‘flower-girl’, was the second daughter from the second marriage of a wealthy lumber merchant, Wu Shiyue, whose support for the first emperor of the Tang dynasty, Gaozu, won him favour, influence and official status at court in Chang’an on the Wei River. At the age of thirteen, after her father’s death, Huagu was taken into the inner court of the second Tang emperor, Taizong, and renamed Talent Wu, one of nine fifth-rank concubines. Quick wits, accomplishments in learning and her natural physical beauty ensured her subsequent elevation to the second rank of concubines, in the role of the ‘Lady of luminous deportment’.

The imperial harem was a complex environment. Its women were confined within the inner court of the palace, their only intermediaries with the outside world carefully chosen eunuchs who ran errands for them and ensured – or attempted to ensure – their sexual isolation. They constituted the personal and exclusive sexual retinue of the emperor as secretaries, ladies-in-waiting on the empress, conduits for intelligence and scandal and objects of unattainable desire for the unmarried male elite in the emperor’s service.

After Emperor Taizong’s death in 649, Gaozong became third Tang emperor and his father’s concubines were, by tradition, sent into monastic retreat – a sort of purdah – after which they might marry and re-enter society. The ‘enchanting Miss Wu’, as she was now known, was sent to a Buddhist convent where her hair was shorn and she was stripped of all material adornments. But not all contact with her admirer was severed. A wonderfully evocative love poem, which she sent to the new emperor, survives:

I look upon your disc of jade and my thoughts scatter in disarray

As, haggard from grief, sundered and separate, I so keenly miss my sovereign.

If you do not believe this endless litany of tears

Then open my chest and examine my tear-stained pomegranate-red dress.

On a contrived visit to her convent, Gaozong openly wept when he saw her. Within two years he had brought his lover back into the imperial court, in scandalous and direct competition with both his childless Empress Yang and with his ‘Pure consort’, or favourite concubine. In 652 Wu Zhao bore the first of six of his children, precipitating a series of intrigues, manoeuvrings and scandals that culminated in the deposition of her rivals and her eventual enthronement as empress consort three years later.

Wu Zhao’s political victory was won through the careful cultivation of those lesser women of the court who had been excluded from the empress’s circle of intimates, and by her assiduous loyalty to the emperor. Now unsurpassed in her access to power, she had both her rivals killed and, a year later, her son Li Hong was designated crown prince, heir to the imperial throne.

In a state relying heavily on elaborate ceremony, on the cultivation of revered gods and goddesses and on the maintenance of a careful balance between Confucian, Taoist and Buddhist interests, Wu Zhao consciously embraced her role as earthly mother of the nation. She was an enthusiastic sponsor of Buddhism. She performed public rituals at the shrine of Leizu, goddess of silk and patron of women and weaving. She enlisted the services of a Taoist shaman: to divine the future; to bring luck to her friends; to cast spells and curses against her enemies. After the emperor suffered a stroke in 660, Empress Consort Wu was an increasingly active participant in state affairs alongside a husband whom later historians have branded as correspondingly weak.

Ambitious, mould-breaking dynasts they may have been, but Gaozong and Wu were by no means insensitive to the politics of tradition. In 666 the imperial couple embarked on a ceremonial pilgrimage to the sacred temples on Mount Tai in northeast China, where they performed ancient rites of Feng and Shan, expressions of imperial might and cultural harmony: a celebration and honouring of heaven and earth.

In the following decade, the empress consort spent the fruits of her accumulated political capital. She issued a series of edicts in which taxes were lowered, the imperial army shrunk, the burden of enforced imperial service reduced and agricultural reforms enacted. She gathered around her a group of low-born scholars, poets and intellectuals whose collective writings acted as both propagandist tracts and statements of her own cultural ideology.

On the death of the emperor in 683, Wu effectively ruled as regent on behalf of successive sons, both of whom she deposed during the next seven years. In 690 she declared herself emperor. In 705, at the age of eighty, she was herself dethroned in a palace coup and died shortly afterwards; but her oldest surviving son, Zhongzong, succeeded to the imperial throne and the Tang dynasty, thus restored, survived for another 200 years.

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In the West, on a more modest political scale, women who achieved high rank and executive power were generally portrayed – by contemporary male historians – as either devious, scheming femmes fatales or seasoned, tough-skinned dowagers. Strategies that might, in the male exercise of authority, have been characterised as pragmatic, were condemned as manipulative. The disposal of rivals was vindictive. Political decisions made by women were cold-blooded; ambition unshakeable.

The Empress Theodora (500–548), wife of Justinian I who ruled the Eastern Roman empire in the sixth century, was a principled, courageous saviour; or, according to the historian Procopius, who knew her, a scheming ex-prostitute. Gregory of Tours, bishop and chronicler of the notoriously plot-ridden Frankish state at the end of the sixth century, characterised Queen Fredegunda (died 597), the consort of Chilperic I and regent for her sons, as an adulterous upstart and murderer. A servant of the Frankish king, she persuaded him to repudiate his first wife. She was deposed in her turn, but strangled her replacement. She was also said to have ordered the assassination of King Sigebert, precipitating a long-running feud with his widow, Brunhild. Like Wu Zhao, she plotted her way to the top and, in expiation of her sins, enacted liberal domestic policies, becoming a notable patron of the church.

Such one-dimensional depictions of women who sought to exercise power in patriarchal cultures of courtly amorality, political excess and ruthless expediency tend to overshadow more nuanced careers. In seventh-century Northumbria, a number of outstanding women played pivotal roles in the development of an emerging Christian Anglo-Saxon state. ?thelburh, a Frankish/Kentish princess, was instrumental in the conversion to Christianity of her husband, King Edwin of Northumbria. Her daughter Eanflaed (626–685) married King Oswiu of Northumbria and with him initiated a series of monastic foundations of considerable political significance. She later became abbess of the royal monastery at Whitby. Her predecessor there, St Hild (614–80), was raised in Queen ?thelburh’s court after the murder of her exiled father. She first founded a monastery on the banks of the River Wear before governing a community at Hartlepool. In 657 she became the founding abbess of Whitby, where she ruled over both female and male communities and was charged with organising the epoch-making synod held there in 664.^† She is also credited with talent-spotting the celebrated singer and poet Caedmon, a lay brother at Whitby where he looked after the community’s livestock. In his Ecclesiastical History of the English People, the monk and chronicler the Venerable Bede describes her as a woman of great industry and virtue, and has this to say of Hild and her church:

…no one was rich, no one in need, for they had all things in common and none had any private property. So great was her prudence that not only ordinary men and women but also kings and princes sometimes sought and received her counsel when in difficulties.²

Hild was succeeded as abbess at Whitby by the former queen, Eanfl?d,^‡ then by Eanfl?d’s daughter, ?lffl?d (654–714). The latter played a prominent role in arranging the succession of her half-brother King Aldfrith to the throne of Northumbria after the death in battle in 685 of her brother, King Ecgfrith.

Not all Anglo-Saxon queenly careers were so fruitful. ?lffl?d’s sister Osthryth married a king of Mercia named ?thelred (reigned 675–704). She played the role of ‘peace-weaver’ between her brother, Ecgfrith of Northumbria, and her husband. The term is poetic, while the politics of royal women’s lives, sacrificed to the needs of political alliance, are only too real.^§ Her loyalties were tested when her brother made war against Mercia in 679; another brother, ?lfwine, was a fatal casualty. Despite such distractions, the royal Mercian couple were enthusiastic patrons of the church and endowed a monastery at Bardney, in Lincolnshire, with the mortal remains of Osthryth’s martyred uncle, the cephalophoric King Oswald, slain by ?thelred’s father, King Penda. Her divided loyalties may have made Osthryth a target of the Mercian elite: she was murdered in 697. Playing for high stakes, Early Medieval women of power were as likely to fall foul of the political fates as they were to profit from them.