Wu Zetian: Why Did 60,000 People Petition a Woman to Be Their Emperor?

She was a nun at twenty-five, empress consort at thirty-one, and at sixty-six she did what no woman had done in three thousand years of Chinese history. She took the title of emperor and founded her own dynasty, using a Buddhist sutra to solve a problem Confucian political theory said was unsolvable. The historians who wrote her record spent thirteen centuries making sure no one tried it again.

The convent that was supposed to erase her

In 649, a twenty-five-year-old woman had her head shaved and was sent to a Buddhist convent. Her name was Wu, and she had spent the previous decade as a low-ranking concubine in the palace of Emperor Taizong, the greatest ruler of the Tang dynasty. Taizong had died, and the system had a tidy disposal method for his women: shave their heads, shut them in a temple, and let them pray for his soul until they stopped being a problem. She was supposed to disappear.

She did not. While the old emperor lay dying, she had caught the eye of his heir, the crown prince Li Zhi. The attraction was taboo, since she had technically been his father's woman. When Li Zhi took the throne as Emperor Gaozong, he was married to Empress Wang and surrounded by other consorts. Empress Wang, who was barren and losing ground to a favored rival named Consort Xiao, saw a use for the young woman from the convent. Wang arranged for Wu to be brought back to the palace, in flagrant violation of convention, as an ally against Xiao. It was the last decision Wang made freely.

Wu had entered the palace once before, at thirteen or fourteen, when a eunuch arrived looking for concubines and her family sent her. Her mother wept at the parting. The girl answered, as the Old Book of Tang records, "How do you know that it is not my fortune to meet the Son of Heaven?" It sounds too perfectly prophetic, but it fit the woman the record then spent centuries trying to discredit.

She was literate, aggressive, and unafraid of the old emperor. Taizong owned a horse so wild that no one could master it, and he asked his palace women for ideas. Wu answered, as the Tang histories recount: "I can control him, but I shall need three things: first, an iron whip; second, an iron mace; and third, a dagger. If the iron whip does not bring him to obedience I will use the iron mace to beat his head, and if that does not do it I will use the dagger and cut his throat." Taizong, an old warrior, was pleased. He made her his secretary for ten years, which meant she spent a decade reading state documents while the other concubines did laundry. The convent interrupted that education. The return to the palace completed it.

The bamboo curtain

By 655, Wu had replaced Empress Wang as Gaozong's empress consort. The official histories say she got there by smothering her own week-old daughter and blaming the death on Wang, who had been the last to hold the baby. They say that after Wang and Consort Xiao were deposed and imprisoned, Wu had their hands and feet cut off and their mutilated bodies thrown into vats of wine, with the comment, according to the traditional accounts, "Now these two witches can get drunk to their bones." These stories come from histories written by men whose entire intellectual framework held that a woman in power was an offense against nature. The smothering of the infant is attested in sources compiled centuries after the event. The mutilation story may be true, may be embellished, or may be the kind of detail that gets attached to a woman who does things only men are supposed to do. The people who wrote them had every reason to make them worse.

What is not in dispute is the mechanism. In 660, Gaozong suffered a debilitating stroke that blinded him and left him unable to read state papers. Wu took over. When court protocol barred women from presiding over audiences, she instituted the practice of ruling from behind a bamboo curtain. The emperor sat in front. She sat behind him, and the officials addressed the curtain. In 674, Gaozong took the title Tian Huang, Emperor of Heaven, and gave Wu the title Tian Hou, Empress of Heaven. As the New Book of Tang records, "people throughout the empire referred to them as the 'Two Holy Ones.'" There were two emperors now, and everyone knew which one made the decisions.

Gaozong died in 683. His final decree, preserved in the New Book of Tang, ordered the crown prince to take the throne but instructed that "for major military and state affairs that could not be decided, he was also to seek instructions from" the empress. She had been written into the will as the permanent regent. She did not treat the arrangement as temporary. Her eldest son, Li Hong, had died under suspicious circumstances years before. Her second son took the throne as Zhongzong and lasted six weeks before she deposed him for daring to appoint his father-in-law to office. Her third son became Ruizong and was kept under house arrest in the inner palace, a puppet with a title. She had the power to remove and install emperors, and she used it.

The sutra that made a woman emperor

The problem was not power. She already had it. The problem was legitimacy. Since the first emperor, Qin Shi Huang, unified China in 221 BCE, the title huangdi, emperor, had never been held by a woman. The Mandate of Heaven flowed through the male bloodline of the ruling house. Confucian political theory, which governed the bureaucracy she depended on, had no slot for a female sovereign. A regent could rule on behalf of a child emperor, but a woman ruling in her own name, founding her own dynasty, was a category error. She needed a different kind of authority, and she found it in a religion the Confucian establishment had always regarded with suspicion.

Buddhism offered something Confucianism did not: a sacred text in which the Buddha prophesied that a woman would rule. The Great Cloud Sutra contained a passage in which the Buddha predicted that a female deity named Vimalaprabha would be reborn as a powerful, compassionate ruler of the entire world. The prophecy said she would rule in a female body, by choice, as a bodhisattva and a chakravartin, a wheel-turning universal monarch. Buddhist monks at Wu's court produced a commentary on this sutra, the Commentary on the Great Cloud Sutra, and presented it to the court. The commentary identified Wu as the prophesied ruler. She was, the monks declared, both the reincarnation of the female bodhisattva and an incarnation of Maitreya, the future Buddha, born to govern the world.

This was not a woman whispering prayers in a temple. This was a state propaganda operation. In 690, Wu ordered the establishment of a network of Great Cloud monasteries across the empire, each one a node in a system that preached her divine right to rule. The scholar Antonino Forte, in his landmark study Political Propaganda and Ideology in China at the End of the Seventh Century, reconstructed how Buddhist monks, including an Indian monk she personally invited, produced interpolated scriptures to support her claim. Her biographer N. Harry Rothschild showed in Emperor Wu Zhao and Her Pantheon of Devis, Divinities, and Dynastic Mothers that she did not rely on Buddhism alone. She deployed female divinities from all three traditions, Buddhist goddesses, Confucian exemplary mothers, and Daoist immortals, building what Rothschild called a pantheon carefully calibrated to give a woman on the throne the cultural resonance the Confucian system denied her.

In 690, the campaign reached its culmination. Sixty thousand people, including Confucian officials, imperial relatives, Buddhist clergy, tribal chieftains, and commoners, petitioned her to proclaim a new dynasty and take the throne. Her son Ruizong yielded. She declared the Zhou dynasty, named for the ancient Zhou whose founders she claimed as ancestors, and took the title Shengshen Huangdi, Sacred and Divine Emperor. She was sixty-six. She created a new Chinese character for her personal name, 曌 (Zhao), combining the radicals for sun, moon, and sky, a character that had never existed before and that no one else was permitted to use. She was the only woman in three thousand years of Chinese history to hold the title of emperor in her own right, and she had gotten there not by seizing it but by making the bureaucracy, the clergy, and sixty thousand subjects ask her to take it.

The serpent and the wolf

The histories that survived her call her a monster. One assessment, preserved in the official records, summed her up as a ruler "with a heart like a serpent and a nature like that of a wolf" who "favored evil sycophants and destroyed good and loyal officials." The list of crimes ran on: "She killed her sister, butchered her elder brothers, murdered the ruler, poisoned her mother. She is hated by gods and men alike."

She did maintain a secret police. After rebellions by Tang loyalists in 684, she installed copper mailboxes outside government buildings so that anyone, of any rank, could post anonymous denunciations. As the historian R.W.L. Guisso documented, she passed legislation that "empowered informers of any social class to travel at public expense" to report to the court. Officials named Suo Yuanli, Zhou Xing, and Lai Junchen rose to carry out systematic interrogations, and the Comprehensive Mirror, the Song dynasty chronicle, records that during the 690s thirty-six senior bureaucrats were executed or forced to commit suicide, and a thousand members of their families were enslaved.

The apparatus had a grim logic, aimed at aristocratic families and Tang loyalists who opposed her, its tools men who owed everything to her. The most famous episode of the terror involved Zhou Xing, a secret police official. Lai Junchen invited Zhou to lunch and asked him how to get the accused to confess. Zhou, as the Zizhi Tongjian records, answered: "That is easy. Take a big urn and set a fire under it. Put the accused in it, and surely he will confess everything." Lai had the urn brought and the fire lit, then rose and said: "I had received secret instructions from Her Imperial Majesty with regard to you, my brother. Please enter the urn." Zhou knelt and confessed. The phrase entered the Chinese language as qing jun ru weng, "invite the gentleman into the urn," meaning to trap someone in the device they built for others.

The terror had a governor. In 697, Lai Junchen overreached and plotted to accuse Wu's own sons, the Wu clan princes, and her daughter Princess Taiping of treason. The princes and the princess struck first, and Wu approved his execution. His enemies, the histories say, fought over his flesh. After Lai's death, the worst of the purges subsided. She had built the machine, and she had known when to break it.

The question is whether she was worse than the men who preceded and followed her. As the historian Mike Dash wrote in the Smithsonian, "None of these actions, though, would have attracted criticism had she been a man. Every Chinese emperor had concubines, and most had favorites; few came to power, or stayed there, without the use of violence. Taizong forced the abdication of his own father and disposed of two older brothers in hand-to-hand combat before seizing the throne." The same Taizong who killed his brothers is revered as the greatest Tang emperor. Wu, who ruled longer and more competently than most of her predecessors, is a serpent.

Her record as an administrator is harder to discredit, because the results outlived the propaganda. She opened the civil service examination to men of humble birth, breaking the aristocratic monopoly on office. She promoted officials on merit, and even hostile historians conceded she could evaluate their performance. She reformed the mourning code so that children mourned mothers as long as fathers, and required female ancestors be honored alongside male ones. She appointed women to real authority, including the poet Shangguan Wan'er, whose family she had destroyed, as chief drafter of imperial edicts. The Tang golden age that followed, the reign of Xuanzong from 712 to 756, was built on the administrative foundations she laid. As the historian C.P. Fitzgerald argued, "Without Wu there would have been no long enduring Tang dynasty and perhaps no lasting unity of China."

The coup and the record

In 705, she was eighty-one and in declining health, spending her final years with two young favorites, the brothers Zhang Yizhi and Zhang Changzong, former entertainers she elevated to dukedoms whose influence the court found intolerable. In February of that year, a group of generals and officials stormed the palace, killed the Zhang brothers, and forced her to abdicate in favor of her exiled son Zhongzong. The Tang was restored. She died in December of that year, and the Zhou dynasty she founded vanished from the official record as though it had been a clerical error, a fifteen-year interruption in the rightful succession of the Li family.

The record itself is the last mechanism worth examining. The sources suffer a compound distortion: they are official, written as moral lessons for future rulers, weighted against usurpers, and produced by scholars offended by a woman in power. She herself tampered with the record. Her enemies, relatives of the people she killed, wrote other accounts. "It is a challenge," Dash wrote, "to recover real people from this morass of bias."

The real person is recoverable, but only sideways, through the effects of her actions rather than through the characterizations of the men who hated her. She held power for nearly half a century, ruling an empire that stretched from the Korean peninsula to the borders of Persia through a period of stability and growth. She used a religious text to rewrite the rules of who could be emperor, and she built the institutional machinery, monasteries, examination halls, informant networks, a new bureaucracy drawn from the meritorious rather than the well-born, to make the rewrite stick. She was, as her biographer N. Harry Rothschild observed, a woman who emerged at the right time, in a more liberal moment of China's medieval period, when the Tang was cosmopolitan enough to tolerate a woman who rode horses, wore male attire, and refused to stay behind the curtain.

No woman after her took the throne. The lesson the historians drew, and spent thirteen centuries reinforcing, was not that a woman could rule well. It was that a woman who ruled would be remembered as a serpent, no matter what she built. It is not obvious that no woman after her was capable. The record of what happened to the last one may have been enough to discourage the next.

Read the full life: Wu Zhao: China's Only Female Emperor by N. Harry Rothschild (Pearson Longman, 2008), the standard biography by the scholar who devoted twenty years to her. For the Buddhist legitimation campaign in depth, see Antonino Forte, Political Propaganda and Ideology in China at the End of the Seventh Century (Istituto Universitario Orientale, 1976). For a narrative account, Jonathan Clements, Wu: The Chinese Empress Who Schemed, Seduced and Murdered Her Way to Become a Living God (Sutton Publishing, 2007).