Zona aferente

On 21 September 690

– the tenth day of the eighth month, Ji-mao – Wu Chao proclaimed an amnesty from the tower of the Tse-tien Gate and announced the change of dynasty from T’ang to Chou. Jui-tsung abdicated to become Emperor Expectant. His son was demoted from Crown Prince to Imperial Grandson and Wu took the throne as Shen-sheng huang-ti – Holy and Divine Emperor, the first and, until now, only woman Emperor of China. She was now the Daughter of Heaven.

She chose as her first reign name T’ien-shou – ‘Heaven Bestowed’.

This was a reference to the white stone and the Lo-river prophecy. Her parents became Non-Pareil Imperial Majesty and Empress Dowager.

The yellow banners of the T’ang were replaced with red ones and ‘Wu’

replaced ‘T’ang’ in place names throughout the Empire. Otherwise, court dress, ceremonial and official titles, and office names remained much the same after the change of dynasty, since Chou styles had already been adopted.

Wu Ch’eng-ssu now became Prince of Wei and Wu San-ssu Prince of Liang, and the other twenty-one surviving members of the Wu clan were given princely rank. Other Wu supporters were promoted and given titles. The censor who had arranged the petition asking Wu Chao to become Emperor was promoted through the ranks so quickly that he wore the different colour robes of four different ranks – blue, green, red and purple – in a single year. In court he was known as the Official of the Four Seasons.

The change of dynasty from T’ang to Chou was to be celebrated by another monumental building, the T’ien Shu or ‘Pivot of Heaven’. It was

a stele one hundred and five feet high that stood outside the Tuan Men – the south gate of the Imperial City – directly in front of the Bridge of the Ford of Heaven in the middle of Luoyang. Its iron base, one hundred and seventy feet in diameter, provided a plinth for huge bronze dragons to sit on. These supported the twelve-foot-wide octagonal pillar whose faces were five feet across. They were decorated with reliefs showing other fabulous beasts. It was topped by a canopy thirty feet around and ten feet high, made to look like clouds. Four twelve-foot dragons stood on it, holding a ten-foot-diameter ball of copper. The castings were designed by Wu Chao’s youngest nephew Wu San-ssu and crafted by Mao P’o-lo, using over a thousand kilograms of iron and copper. The names of all tributary chieftains and imperial officials who owed allegiance to Wu Chao were carved on the pillar, along with an inscription written by Wu Chao herself: ‘The Celestial Pillar commemorating the ten thousand virtues of the Great Chou dynasty.’

She also began the massive task of walling the city and continued building temples, monuments and public works with the aim of making Luoyang a worthy rival to Ch’ang-an.

After taking the imperial throne, Wu Chao believed that she was still surrounded by enemies. Due to pay a visit to the Shanglin Park, she sensed danger. She wrote later, ‘On the eighth day of the twelfth lunar month, the second year of the T’ian-shou reign [4 January 692], some officials intended to deceive me into visiting the Shanglin Park by announcing that the flowers were already in bloom there. In fact, they were planning a conspiracy. I agreed to their invitation but soon after sus-pected their scheme. So I sent a messenger to read this proclamation.’

It read,

Tomorrow morning I will make an outing to Shanglin Park, With urgent haste I inform the spring:

Flowers must open their petals overnight, Don’t wait for the morning wind to blow.

‘The next morning the Shanglin Park was suddenly filled with blossom,’

she said. ‘The officials all sighed with relief over this unusual phenomenon.’

This is often quoted as evidence of Wu Chao’s early attempts to cre-ate an image as the all-powerful Emperor, though it was written well after

the establishment of the Chou dynasty. She was so powerful, she pro-claimed, that even the flowers obeyed her. In fact, once she was Emperor, there was little opposition. Even the official history of the T’ang dynasty was none too critical of her rule. It said, ‘Reward and punishment came from her alone and she did not borrow the authority of her ministers. She usurped above, but governed well below and so could rule the Empire.’

In the first six years of her reign, China prospered. It then suffered a downturn after the country was defeated by the Tibetans. The economy revived under Ti Jen-chieh, but flagged later under the corruption brought in by the Chang brothers.

Like Roman Emperors, Wu Chao ruled by providing bread and cir-cuses. She used the tax money flooding in during this initial period of prosperity to fund Grand Carnivals in which the populace took to the streets and ate and drank too much. There were sideshows, street per-formers and parades that featured huge floats called ‘mountain carts’, built like gigantic wagons and hung with silk, or ‘drought boats’, made from bamboo and wood. These were accompanied by carts drawn by bullocks dressed in tiger-skins, carrying musicians brought in from hundreds of miles away. Entertainments included slim young girls who could hang by their chins from poles, Taoists who would climb barefoot up a ladder of swords and an armless beggar who could juggle brushes with his feet and reproduce the finest calligraphy. Two wrestling teams headed by sumo-sized grapplers named Peng and Gao put on a show equal to anything on the World Wrestling Entertainment stage today. At one contest Peng grabbed a live suckling pig and gnawed the flesh from its head and neck, then released it squealing into the crowd. Not to be outdone, Gao ate a live cat tail first, consuming its rear end, intestines and belly while the creature screeched and scratched. At this point Peng conceded.

Medieval Chinese carnivals had a tradition of gruesome magic acts.

An Indian cut off his tongue, showed the stump, handed round the sev-ered portion, then put it back in his mouth and rejoined it to the stump.

And a Buddhist monk pulled out his intestines and washed them, then returned them to his belly cavity. Kao-tsung had tried to ban these grisly performances in 656, year one Hsien Ch’ang. But they soon reappeared.

In 670, year one Hsien Heng, a magician appeared who could suspend a jug of water from a rope, then cut the rope, but the jug would not fall.

More horribly, he would put the jug in a locked room and, after a while, spectators would be allowed into the room to find the magician’s dis-membered body in the jug, floating in his own blood. Then, after the spectators had been ushered out, he reassembled himself and appeared outside in one piece once more. He had a sideline selling fortunes, but was reported, arrested and sentenced to death. Predicting the future in medieval China was against the law – as it was in medieval England – since prophesying the death of the monarch constituted treason. He was seen marching to the execution ground without the slightest apprehen-sion, perhaps believing that judicial decapitation was also reversible.

What is now called the ‘Indian Rope Trick’ was performed regularly.

The tale is told of a prisoner escaping this way. He climbed to the top of a two-hundred-foot rope, then flew off like a bird. But the worst of the T’ang magic acts was called ‘Penetrating the Horse’s Belly’. The details are recorded in a Japanese scroll. The illusion was that a man crawls through a horse’s entrails, by having one performer climb into a horse’s anus and then another emerge from its mouth. One can only hope, for the horse’s sake, that the performers were small children or midgets. On a more tasteful level, carnivals also featured dancing horses and hedge-hogs, mechanical toys, and bands of performing spiders that, following musical cues, would form up in various formations.

Wu Chao staged more of these fiestas than any other Emperor – seventeen in her fifteen-year reign. They lasted three, five, seven or even nine days, always an odd number. And they were staged quite randomly on top of the ten regular festivals that occurred throughout the year and the celebration of imperial birthdays, births, deaths, and marriages.

Six months after coming to the throne in her own right, Wu Chao issued an imperial edict that formally gave Buddhist monks and nuns precedence over the Taoist clergy. She had done this, she said, because

‘Buddhism opened the way for changing the mandate of heaven’ – that is, changing the dynasty. However, she did not forget the Confucianists.

In the ten-day period when she founded the Great Cloud temples she bestowed a new title on Confucius and she did the same for his principal disciples later in her reign. She modestly refused any further titles herself and demurred when, in 691, year two T’ien Shou, it was suggested that she perform the feng-shan sacrifices on Mount Sung in Ho-nan. Just a year

into her reign, it was too soon. However, she did perform the feng-shan sacrifices to heaven and earth in a southern suburb of Luoyang in 695, year one T’ien Tse, celebrating the event with a year-long tax break throughout the Empire. A skilled politician, she certainly knew how to keep the people on her side with financial handouts while, simultane-ously, bolstering her authority.

Once the Chou dynasty had been securely established, Wu Chao had little more need of her secret police. But Chou Hsing and Lai Chün-ch’en did not see that times had changed and they continued in their old ways. They tried to remove the advocate Hsü Yu-kung, who had repeatedly thwarted them. When he failed to win an acquittal for a provincial governor, Chou Hsing accused Hsü Yu-kung of being an accomplice of the condemned man and charged him with conspiracy.

Wu Chao heard the case, but refused to condemn Hsü Yu-kung to death.

However, she did remove him from office. A short time later she recalled him and appointed him to the Censorate. Hsü Yu-kung refused the appointment. Falling to the ground with tears in his eyes, he said, ‘The deer on the hills and in the forest are constantly hunted for their flesh. If Your Majesty makes me an officer of the law, I would not assist those who try to pervert Your Majesty’s laws and, consequently, I would be done to death.’

Wu Chao trusted the judgement of Hsü Yu-kung and began to accept that excesses had been committed in her name. Nevertheless she insisted that be become a censor. The news of his promotion was greeted with joy throughout China. Wu Chao then moved against Chou Hsing and Lai Chün-ch’en. General Ch’iu Shen-chi, who had been instrumental in the suppression of the princes’ revolt and the suicide of the former Crown Prince Li Hsien, had recently fallen victim to their predations. Chou Hsing was accused of being a confederate of the executed general and Wu Chao ordered Lai Chün-ch’en to investigate.

Lai Chün-ch’en invited his old friend and colleague to dinner without telling him about the charges. Over the meal Lai Chün-ch’en complained to Chou Hsing that too many of those accused of serious crimes refused to confess – which is hardly surprising, since they were, for the most part, innocent. He asked Chou Hsing whether he could come up with a new torture device that would guarantee a prisoner would

admit any charges levelled against them. Chou Hsing was flattered and said that it was really a very simple matter. What Lai Chün-ch’en should do was boil a large cauldron of water and show this to the prisoner, saying that if he did not confess he would be hurled into it. Lai Chün-ch’en agreed that this was an excellent idea and he ordered that a cauldron be prepared while the two friends continued eating. When dinner was over and the cauldron was boiling nicely, Lai Chü-ch’en said, ‘My brother, I have evidence against you. Please step into the cauldron.’

Chou Hsing was right. The device worked. He immediately confessed everything Lai Chün-ch’en put to him.

‘Please step into the cauldron’ – qing jun ru weng – has become a Chinese idiom for luring a victim into a trap and is sometimes used as the title for the Chinese translation of Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure.

Despite his confession, Wu spared Chou Hsing’s life, banishing him to the southern province of Kuangtung. But during his time in the secret police Chou Hsing had ruined the lives of thousands of people and earned himself a great many enemies. Wu Chao, herself, found him guilty of hun-dreds of miscarriages of justice. On his way south, he was waylaid by the family of one of his many victims and killed. To appease public opinion, Wu Chao had other secret policemen executed, but Lai Chün-ch’en held on, since he still enjoyed the support of the Wu clan thanks to the efficient job he had done in exterminating the Li after the princes’ revolt.

Wu Ch’en-ssu was angling to become Crown Prince and a petition, instigated by a minister named Chang Chia-fu and signed by several hundred people, was presented on his behalf. Wu Chao referred the matter to her ministers. Perhaps realizing that she was not very keen on elevating Wu Ch’en-ssu, they pointed out that she had already named her son Jui-tsung as her successor. That being the case, the matter should never have been raised, since the Emperor’s decision in these matters should not be questioned. Two ministers even asked for those who had organized the petition to be prosecuted for sedition. The Wu clan fought back and, with the help of Lai Chün-ch’en, had the two ministers prose-cuted for conspiracy and exeprose-cuted.

As Wu Ch’en-ssu could not himself raise the matter of the succession, he employed Wang Ch’ing-chih as an agent to forward his cause at court.

But when he was granted an audience Wu Chao was adamant.

‘My son is the Imperial Heir,’ she said. ‘Why should I have him deposed?’

‘The spirits do not consort with those of another kind,’ Wang Ch’ing-chih replied. ‘And men do not respect those of another clan. A Wu now holds the Empire. How can a Li be Your Majesty’s successor?’

Wu Chao was furious with Wang Ch’ing-chih, since Jui-tsung had already had the good sense to change his name to Wu, and she ordered Wang Ch’ing-chih from her presence. Wang Ch’ing-chih promptly fell to the ground, weeping and begging her forgiveness. To get rid of him, she gave him a pass to the palace.

Meanwhile Wu Chang-ssu sought to move against T’ang loyalists in the government who might oppose his elevation. He accused Ti Jen-chieh, the censor Wei Yüan-chung and five other T’ang officials of conspiracy and got Lai Chün-ch’en to arrest them. Wu Chao had given Lai Chün-ch’en a decree saying that all those who admitted their guilt at their first interrogation would be spared. Unwilling to die over a palace intrigue, Ti Jen-chieh promptly confessed.

‘Following the Chou revolution, everything is being changed,’ he said. ‘The old T’ang officials are in fear of their lives, so we joined in a conspiracy.’

But Wei Yüan-chung was made of sterner stuff. He refused to break even under torture.

‘If you want my head, cut it off,’ he told Lai Chün-ch’en. ‘Why bother with a confession?’

After making his own confession, Ti Jen-chieh was allowed a certain amount of freedom. His guards even thought that, as he was to be spared, he might even rise to power again, and asked favours of him. Ti Jen-chieh’s only reply was to curse and beat his head against a pillar.

Unsettled by this reaction, the guards withdrew. This allowed Ti Jen-chieh time to write a letter to his son on the silk lining of his coat, explaining that he had been forced to confess even though he was not guilty. When the guards returned, Ti Jen-chieh remarked that it was warm in jail and asked them to take his coat home for him to have the thick winter lining removed.

Keen to ingratiate themselves with Ti Jen-chieh, they did so. When the lining was being removed Ti Jen-chieh’s son found his father’s

message and petitioned Wu Chao for an audience. After reading the letter on the silk lining, Wu Chao summoned Lai Chün-ch’en, who said that the letter could not be genuine, since the prisoners had not been stripped of their clothes and Ti Jen-chieh still had his coat. When Wu Chao sent an official to check out his story, Lai Chün-ch’en had Ti Jen-chieh dressed up in a borrowed coat. The official, not daring to hang around the prison too long, made no further enquiries and Lai Chün-ch’en, thinking he had got away with it, sent to the court forged state-ments from Ti Jen-chieh and the others admitting their guilt and petitioning for the sentence of death.

In the meantime, the ten-year-old nephew of another of Lai Chün-ch’en’s victims, who had been sold as a slave to the Department of Agriculture when his family was destroyed, managed to get an audience with Wu Chao. When she asked why he had come, he replied, ‘My father is dead and my family is no more because Lai Chün-chen and his henchmen have twisted Your Majesty’s laws. If You Majesty does not believe that, please send Your most loyal and trusted ministers to Lai Chün-ch’en as if he were a traitor. If he is not, Lai Chün-ch’en will certainly make him one.’

Perhaps the Grand Astrologer was right forty years before when he predicted that after Wu Chao came to the throne she would mellow with

Perhaps the Grand Astrologer was right forty years before when he predicted that after Wu Chao came to the throne she would mellow with

In document CENTRO PORTUARIO CULTURAL DE LA PESCA (página 48-53)