In 685,
year one Ch’ui Kung, Liu Jen-kuei, viceroy of Ch’ang-an, died.He was the last of the leading figures of the regime to owe his allegiance to T’ai-tsung. Now Wu Chao could start the moves that would make the dynasty her own. First she exiled Chung-tsung, who had been held in prison in Luoyang since he had been stripped of power. He was sent to Fang-chou in Hupei with his pregnant wife and did not return to the capital until 698, year one Shen Lung. There he lived in relative freedom with his family. But Fang-chou was surrounded by hills and was easily guarded.
At this time the President of the Board of Rites was a relative of Li Ching-yeh who had saved his own head by denouncing the rebels. He came up with a suitable quotation from the classical Shu Ching, or ‘Offi-cial History’ written in the fourth century bc or before, which helped Wu Chao’s bid for ultimate power. It read, ‘They let fall altogether their robes and governed the Empire.’ This was supposed to convey how effortlessly those who had been chosen by heaven to rule took power – it was as easy as letting your robe fall. It could also be seen as being particu-larly apt in Wu Chao’s case, since she had achieved power by letting fall her robe for T’ai-tsung and Kao-tsung. The quotation was published throughout the Empire and the reign name was changed to Ch’ui Kung – ‘Let Fall Altogether’, the opening words of the quote – for the next four years. Other prophecies and predictions were circulated, giving the impression that Wu Chao’s right to power was written in the heavens.
Now a widow, the Empress Wu had taken a lover named Feng Hsiao-pao. This means ‘Little Precious’. He was a lowly peddler, an
‘unlicensed seller of sedge, herbs and cosmetics’ – essentially a dealer in drugs and aphrodisiacs. Powders and potions were widely used to improve love-making in medieval China. Sulphur was used as an astringent to tighten the vagina. A red powder that was a mixture of cinnamon, mustard, pepper and ginger was applied to the male glans.
This was designed to make the head of the penis and the mucus mem-brane of the walls of the vagina swell, increasing stimulation, and opium pills were used to prolong an erection. A poem ran,
Take only a speck of it; once it comes on you Run like the wind to the bedchamber.
The first encounter will leave you invigorated;
The second will make you stronger than before.
If twelve beauties, dressed in scarlet, were waiting for you, You would be able to have them all, any way you wished.
All night long, your weapon would stand on end.
You would find new strength in your limbs and belly;
Your testicles would constantly be refreshed and your penis invigorated.
If you take a grain or so each time, Your weapon would be merciless, Your manhood would be rigid.
At the first planting, the seed would germinate.
You can have ten women in one night And feel no slackening of your vital powers.
Older women will furrow their brow.
Younger ones will be exhausted.
When you are satisfied and want to stop Take a mouthful of cold water.
Withdraw your weapon;
You will not be harmed.
Herbs were used if there were problems in gaining an erection in the first place. One recipe ran,
If, upon rubbing and toying with it, the prickle will not stand at point, thy mistress must take dried aromatic herbs – such as are scattered upon corpses – a couple of handkerchiefs and a gugglet of water. Wash the prickle, as if it were a dead body, then shroud it with herbs and lament the untimely fate of such a young and vigorous yard; for such must ward
away the Evil Eye, which has ensorcelled thy member. Verily, thy penis is buried so that it may soon experience resurrection.
And there were ways of enlarging the penis. For some reason, they often involved butchering a dog. This recipe is typical:
Take three fen of prime jou ch’ung jung [a herb] and two fen of hai taso [a special seaweed] and grind them into a powder. Find a white dog born in the first moon of any year. Mix the secretions of its liver into the powder to make a paste. Apply this to your jade stem three times. The next day at dawn, draw water from the well and wash the paste off. Your jade stem will definitely have grown three inches.
Arriving in Luoyang in the mid-680s, Feng Hsiao-pao had first become the lover of a maidservant of the Princess Ch’ien-chin, Kao-tsu’s eigh-teenth daughter – a T’ang and in fear of her life. Princess Ch’ien-chin sought to ingratiate herself with the Dowager Empress Wu by introduc-ing Feng Hsiao-pao to her via the good offices of Wu Chao’s daughter, Princess Tai-ping. He was, it was said, fei-ch’ang ts’ai-yung – a man of
‘unusual abilities’. Plainly he demonstrated these to the Empress when he was summoned to an audience. It is clear that they became lovers almost immediately and, soon after, he was given unrestricted entry to the palace. Although the official histories are discreet about their relation-ship, it caused a scandal at the time. In imperial China, it was obligatory for functionaries allowed regular access to the palace to be eunuchs. One of the courtiers pointed out that, during T’ai-tsung’s reign, when a musi-cian had been employed to teach Wu Chao and the other ladies of the court music, he had first been castrated. Wu Chao declined to follow precedent. Instead Feng Hsiao-pao was give the surname Hsüeh and adopted into the family of the Princess Tai-ping. Her husband Hsüeh Shao had been forced to adopt the newly renamed Hsüeh Huai-i, not as his son, but as his uncle. This may have led Hsüeh Shao into, rashly, backing the forthcoming princes’ rebellion.
Hsüeh Huai-i became a Buddhist priest so that he could serve in the palace chapel. That way, he and Wu Chao could spend a lot of time alone together without outraging protocol. Then Wu Chao installed him as abbot in the White Horse Monastery in the west of the capital, which she
had spent a great deal of money having restored. This was the oldest repository of Buddhist scripture and ancient law in China. The shrine there had been founded by pilgrims who had brought the first of the Buddhist scriptures from India on a white horse. But Hsüeh Huai-i filled the monastery with his mates, a bunch of drunken ruffians who, on his orders, went about beating up Taoist priests. Hsüeh Huai-i mocked the Taoist clerics’ long hair and would have his followers shave their heads.
In the palace he was given the pick of the horses in the stables and had eunuchs to attend him. Even Wu Chao’s two nephews, Wu Ch’eng-ssu and Wu San-ssu, waited on him. No one dared criticize him after a censor who had repeatedly called attention to his behaviour was beaten within an inch of his life.
The monk also insulted the President of the Chancellery, one of the government’s highest officials. Entering the palace one day, Hsüeh Huai-i brushed passed him without a word. When the President of the Chancellery’s servant took the matter into his own hands and slapped Hsüeh Huai-i, he complained to the Empress, but she knew better than to side with a boorish lover against an important statesman and told Hsüeh Huai-i to use the north gate to the palace in future. That way he would not risk running into any more government dignitaries.
Hsüeh Huai-i was useful to her though, even outside the bedroom.
The histories do not record how he came about his education, but Hsüeh Huai-i was a skilled architect and oversaw the building of the Empress’s longed-for Ming-t’ang, or Hall of Illumination. The Scholars of the Northern Gate had been employed to come up with designs for the Ming-t’ang, ignoring more conservative scholars who insisted that it should be a modest structure in the suburbs. For maximum effect, Wu Chao wanted a huge building in the centre of the capital, conveniently near the palace. Construction began in 688, year four Ch’ui Kung, on the site of one of old audience halls, just inside the south gate of the palace. A huge work force was assembled. Massive beams had to be hewn in distant forests and dragged by teams of up to a thousand men to Luoyang.
With a height of two hundred and ninety-four feet, the Ming-t’ang was the first of the tall structures built in the reign of the Empress Wu. It was a huge three-storey pagoda with a base area of three hundred square feet. While the lower two floors were rectangular, the third storey was
round. The walls of the ground floor were decorated with depictions of the four seasons – with the winter along the north wall and summer along the south. The second storey showed the twelve hours of the Chinese day and the third storey showed the twenty-four solar periods of the Chinese year.
The roof was supported by nine great iron pillars shaped like dragons. These carried huge beams that acted as trusses and took the weight. At the apex of the roof, crowning the huge edifice, was a ten-foot iron phoenix, covered in gold. Wu Chao had now taken the phoenix as her personal symbol.
To the north, Hsüeh Huai-i built a small annex called the T’ien-t’ang – ‘The Heaven’. Though it had five storeys, chroniclers say it was ‘slightly less huge, beautiful and awe-inspiring’. After it was first built, it was blown down by a gale, so the Empress had Hsüeh Huai-i rebuild it. Ten thousand workmen were employed to haul fresh wood from distant Kuangtung.
The two buildings were completed at the end of 688 and on 24 December – the twenty-third day of the eleventh month, Wu-wu – they were opened with a great feast. Even then the Chinese had a vast cui-sine, employing most of the ingredients and spices still in use – pork, lamb, duck, fish, crab, oysters, squid, jellyfish, seaweed, fermented soya, garlic, ginger, cardamom, pepper, vinegar, pickles, cinnamon, ginseng, pine ker-nels, rice, bamboo shoots, lychees, oranges, mandarins, tangerines, peaches, kumquats, bananas, dates, figs, hazel nuts, pistachios, and puffers called ‘river piglets’ – the poisonous fish now eaten raw in Japan. The seafood was brought from the coast by relays of runners covering one hun-dred and eighty to three thousand li, or sixty to one hunhun-dred miles, a day.
Added to that were exotic items such as marmots, sea otters, snow pheas-ants, flying cockroaches, bamboo rats the size of dogs that fed on the roots of bamboo, Bactrian camels (particularly their humps), soups made from turtles’ shells or the heads of macaque monkeys, green peacock jerky, mice stuffed with honey and eaten alive at table, frogs dropped live into boiling taro, live shrimps served with vegetables and thick sauces, python hash flavoured with vinegar, salted hornet larvae served with a sauce made from ants’ eggs, citron carved into the shapes of flowers and birds, bears (their paws were considered a delicacy), and elephants slain with a poi-soned arrow (whose trunks were particularly savoured). Some dishes were served in a form we would now recognize as dimsum. Generally beef was
avoided, since cattle were needed to pull ploughs and both Buddhist and Taoists shunned strong-smelling vegetables such as garlic, onions, scal-lions, leeks, and coriander, though Confucians indulged. Honoured guests were plied with silks, brocades and other gifts.
After the feast the people of Luoyang and those people who had managed to travel from remoter regions were allowed to look around the building. This was Wu Chao’s one concession to those whose taxes had paid for the Ming-t’ang. During the building of the Ming-t’ang and the T’ien-t’ang, it was said that Hsüeh Huai-i spent money ‘like sand’. But Wu Chao authorized anything he asked for, regardless of the expense.
Appalled by the spiralling costs, a censor pointed out that, by tradition, a Ming-t’ang was supposed to be a simple thatched hut. Wu Chao’s was covered in gold and jewels and decked out like a ‘temporary nirvana’.
The T’ien-t’ang even housed a huge gilded Buddha, which was two hun-dred feet tall, so large it was said that twenty or thirty men could stand on his outstretched finger. The censor was studiously ignored and a grateful Empress Wu rewarded Hsüeh Huai-i with the rank of general and the title of duke. From then on, all Wu Chao’s great ceremonies were held in the Ming-t’ang and it became known as the Palace of the Ten Thousand Divine Appearances.
Wu Chao began building a new party of supporters to help her take the throne. She sought out men of talent who were outside the educated and privileged classes, and gave them titles and ranks, so key positions were packed with men who owed everything to her. Those who did not come up to scratch or who wavered in their loyalty were sacked or executed.
This policy alienated those who had traditionally held power, so she developed a system to detect and suppress further conspiracies. Anyone with any information about a plot against the throne was to report to a local official who would give them the salary of an official of the fifth grade and provide them with transport to the capital. They were to use the horses from the relay stations of China’s ‘pony express’ to reach Luoyang as quickly as possible. Food and lodging for an official of the fifth grade were laid on along the way. The day the informant arrived at the capital, they would be given an audience with the Empress, and lavishly honoured, entertained and fed at government expense to encourage
others to follow their example. Officials were not to delay or dissuade informers, no matter how lowly their status. Any official who did not send an informer to the capital was charged with the same crime the informer was volunteering information about.
As a result, everyone in the country was terrified that they would be informed on. They offered no opinion that might appear in any way crit-ical and there was no open discussion. Careless talk cost lives. A number of soldiers were eating in an inn at the capital when one of them remarked that as the new Emperor Jiu-tsung was powerless it was much less prof-itable working for him than it had been working for his predecessor Chung-tsung. One of those present left the table and went to inform the police. The soldiers had not even finished eating when the police arrived and arrested them all. The man deemed to have criticized the government was beheaded. The rest were strangled, and the informer promoted.
Regular informers were given government jobs and a networks of these spies were soon turned into an effective secret police force. Those within it sought more and more power. One informer, originally a seller of cakes, was given the rank of general and was sent out around the coun-try to imprison conspirators. But that was not enough for him. He wanted to be a censor. When the Dowager Empress pointed out that he was unsuited for the job, since he could neither read nor write, he said,
‘Neither can leopards, but they are feared none the less.’ The man impressed Wu Chao with his devotion to duty. He refused the standard reward of the possessions of those he helped condemn, saying that he did not want to sully himself with the property of traitors. For him, seeing traitors topple was its own reward.
To make this secret police force more efficient, a spy school was set up under Lai Chün-ch’en and Chou Hsing, two officials in the Board of Justice and Censorate whose biographies appear in the dynastic history under the special category ‘Evil’. They used forgery, torture and under-hand methods outlined in the under-handbook Lo-chih ching – ‘Classic of Entrapment’ – to ensnare suspects. Those they arrested were denied food and sleep. They were interrogated night after night and when they dozed off manure was hurled into their cells. Others were confined in under-ground pits. If no confession was forthcoming, they would be hung up by
their hair or suspended upside down with a rock tied to their head.
Prisoners would have vinegar poured in their nostrils, their ears filled with mud and slivers of bamboo jammed under their fingernails.
There was worse. A small cage was fitted over the victim’s head. Then wedges were driven down the sides, cracking the skull until the brains oozed out.
Lai Chün-ch’en and Chou Hsing gave the new and ever more fiendish tortures they developed poetic names. The devices were paraded before those freshly arrested, who quickly confessed all. Lai Chün-ch’en and Chou Hsing’s torture methods were so effective that those who suf-fered at their hands were willing to implicate anyone they were asked about, so it was possible to remove anyone a whiff of suspicion had attached to – or anyone the secret police did not like. Sometimes Wu Chao’s henchmen simply executed first and made up the charges afterwards.
Although this brutality often suited Wu Chao, she was careful not to let others use it to their advantage. When one of Governor Pei’s subordi-nates wanted to remove his boss, he cut up one of the governor’s mem-orandums and pasted it back together so that it seemed to contain seditious remarks. The governor was arrested. He admitted that the handwriting was his, but denied writing the treasonous document. Three investigations failed to resolve the matter. But Wu Chao was confident of Pei’s loyalty and sent a fourth investigator. He examined the document in sunlight and spotted the joins. Wu Chao then summoned Pei’s accuser and, in front of him, dropped the document into a bowl of water. The paste dissolved and the pieces came apart. The man confessed and was executed.
The rebellion and conspiracy of 684 had left the Empress Wu wary of plots hatched against her and believed Lai Chün-ch’en and Chou Hsing
The rebellion and conspiracy of 684 had left the Empress Wu wary of plots hatched against her and believed Lai Chün-ch’en and Chou Hsing