One of the Empress
Wu’s first acts in government was to invade Korea, China’s only neighbour that could boast a comparable civiliza-tion. China was often under attack from the Turks and the Tibetans – and, earlier, the Mongols – but these were all nomadic peoples. The Chinese knew of the civilization in India, but it was a distant land on the other side of the Himalayas and hard to get to. Persia and Byzantium were also far away and Japan lay beyond the sea, which the Chinese considered to be the boundary of their Empire. Korea had been part of China under the Han dynasty eight hundred years before. Retaking it would bring the regime huge prestige, especially since Sui Yang-ti and T’ai-tsung had so conspicuously failed to do so. So Wu Chao came up with a plan. Instead of attacking across the Liao river, which then formed the border between China and Korea, and the Yalu, which is Korea’s current border with Manchuria, the Empress Wu planned to send 100,000 troops by sea to take Paekche, the southernmost of the three kingdoms that then occu-pied the Korean peninsula, with the aid of Silla, the middle of the three kingdoms. From there, with the aid of Silla, the Chinese could attack the kingdom of Korea itself from both sides.Kao-tsung wanted to head the army in Korea, but Wu opposed it, ostensibly on the grounds of health. It is true that Kao-tsung suffered from ill-health for the remaining twenty-three years of life, but he had recovered enough from his stroke by 660, year five Hsien Ch’ing, to father two more children by the Empress Wu. These were her youngest son Li Tan, born in the seventh month of 662 – Ren-yin, year two Lung Sho – and her only surviving daughter, Princess Tai-ping, a year or two later. The dates of birth of the Emperor’s daughters were not recorded,
unlike the sons born while he reigned. However, Tai-ping was married in 681, probably when she was aged sixteen or seventeen, which meant she was born in 663 or 664, year three Lung Sho or year one Lin Te – Te means ‘virtue’ while Lin is a mythical beast that resembles a deer. The name Tai-ping means ‘Peace’; possibly she was so named because she was born during the Korean war when her parents would have been craving the return of peace. However, given her turbulent later life, the name carries a certain irony.
Kao-tsung was also well enough to travel extensively and the imperial couple visited the province of Shensi, the ancestral home of both their clans. However, Kao-tsung was never strong enough to take over the reins of powers again and remained Emperor now only in name. Keeping the Emperor away from the war also had a sound political motive. If the invasion failed, Kao-tsung would be blamed, possibly resulting in him being ousted from power, as Sui Yang-ti had been, and taking Wu Chao with him. But if it succeeded, he would take all the credit and, embold-ened, those around him might make renewed attempts to bring her down. As it was, while the war in Korea dragged on, one last attempt was made to dislodge her. At the time, she favoured a certain Taoist priest who had been given the run of the palace. He performed certain rites that could easily be construed as sorcery – a powerful charge that had brought about the downfall of Lady Liu of Wei and Liu Shih. A eunuch, who had previously served in the household of the deposed Crown Prince Li Chung, heard about this and reported it to the Vice President of the Secretariat Shang-kuan I, who had also served Li Chung and was the last official to have any ties to the old guard. He told the Emperor and advised him to depose the Empress Wu. Perhaps because he was tired of being Wu Chao’s puppet, Kao-tsung complied and Shang-kuan I drafted a decree deposing her. But the palace was full of Wu Chao’s spies.
Before the Emperor could issue the decree, the Empress Wu went to him, whereupon, the dynastic history records, ‘the Emperor repented and, fearing her anger, told her that it had been done on the advice of Shang-kuan I’.
Shang-kuan I and his eunuch informant were sent to prison, where they died. Shang-kuan I’s property was forfeit and his family were taken into the palace as slaves, a common fate for the family of a disgraced
official. His granddaughter Shang-kuan Wan-erh became a favourite of the Empress Wu and she later rose to a position of great influence under the Empress Wei, consort of Wu Chao’s son Li Che, later Emperor Chung-tsung. But despite the political skills she learned at Wu Chao’s side, she met a tragic end, as we shall see later.
As both Shang-kuan I and the eunuch had worked for the former Crown Prince Li Chung, he too was implicated and was forced to com-mitted suicide in his place of exile. Of the Emperor’s sons, only two who were not Wu Chao’s remained alive. One was Li Su-chieh, the son of the Pure Concubine; the other Li Shang-chin, born of a lowly concubine.
Neither could be considered a threat.
By this time the Chinese army had won several great victories in Korea and destroyed the Japanese armada that had come to the aid of Paekche. In the process four hundred ships had been burnt, leaving ‘the heavens black with smoke and the sea red with blood’. Now the army was tired and wanted to return home, but there were fears that the returning army could be used in a coup to oust the Empress Wu and they were ordered to finish the job in Korea. The veteran Li Chi, then nearly eighty, was sent on what was to be China’s seventh and last campaign against Korea in the seventh century. As a result, three years later, in the ninth lunar month of 668 – Bing-chen, year one Tsung Chang, or ‘Chief Protocol’ – the Korean cap-ital Pyongyang was burnt to the ground, destroying the records of the seven-hundred-and-five-year-old kingdom. Four million Koreans became subjects of China, two hundred thousand of them as slaves, taken as prisoners of war. The war had lasted eight long years, with numerous reverses, but the Empress Wu’s strategy triumphed in the end and the Chi-nese Empire under the T’ang reached now its greatest extent, running from the Korean peninsula to the borders of Persia and Kashmir.
The Empress Wu had good reason to be afraid of the army. Profes-sional soldiers came from large, well-off families and served from the age of twenty-one to sixty. They were well educated and well trained. In the autumn and winter, the slack farming seasons, they participated in huge formal exercises as well as the winter hunt. Exempt from taxes and compulsory labour, professional soldiers were seconded into the twelve imperial guards and the six guards of the Crown Prince, where they served as the capital’s garrison. So they were a force to be reckoned with
and never far from home. In 664, year one Lin Te, Wu Chao cancelled the Great Shoots that had been instituted in 619. Traditionally the Emperor had been carried out of the palace on his throne to watch his soldiers show off their prowess with seven types of crossbow. Plainly, this was a risky business. A single stray arrow loosed by a disaffected soldier could have changed the course of history. The Great Shoots were not revived again until 711, six years after Wu Chao’s death.
Wu Chao had now been Empress for ten years and many of those who had helped her to power had grown old and retired. The government was whittled down to two generals who spent most of their time away on military campaigns. The downfall of Shang-kuan I gave the Empress Wu a free hand and she took over the running of the government completely, in her husband’s name. According to the dynastic history,
From this event, whenever the Emperor attended to business, the Empress hung a curtain and listened from behind it. There was no matter of govern-ment, great or small, she did not hear. The whole sovereign power of the Empire passed into her hands. Life and death, reward or punishment were hers to decide. The Son of Heaven sat on the throne and folded his hands, that is all. In court and in the country, they were called the Two Sages.
Still Wu longed to have the legality of her rule endorsed by divine authority and, in 665, year two Lin Te, she decreed that the time for the feng-shan sacrifices had now arrived. No one pointed out that for Kao-tsung to stage this momentous ceremony, claiming that his work on earth was done so early in his reign, could only be viewed as hubris. Iron-ically the ceremony is supposed to symbolize the complete pacification of the Empire and its contented submission to the rule of the Emperor.
Instead, fighting in Korea had been renewed and there were still political intrigues in court that attempted to bring down the real ruler of the Empire – the Empress. But the people were happy. Five successive bumper harvests had made everyone in China well off and the presence at the ceremony of foreign delegations from as far away as Persia and Japan demonstrated China’s military and diplomatic prowess. Even the son of the dictator of Korea, Ch’uan Kai-Su-Wen, was there, during a brief hiatus in the war. Besides, the celebration was to be accompanied by a promotion for all officials, the distribution of titles and gifts, a general amnesty, alms for the aged and generous donations to the people of the
Shandong and the places the imperial procession passed through on the way to the holy mountain at T’ai-shan.
Nor did anyone object to the participation of the Empress Wu, even though no woman had had any part in the ceremony before. Neverthe-less, Wu had made a thorough study of the ceremony and petitioned the Emperor, saying that there was no reason that, as a woman, she should not take part. It was almost imperative.
‘According to the doctrines laid out in traditional books, the male and female ceremonials are distinct,’ she wrote. ‘There is a female altar because that is the sex of the Earth goddess the divinity sex of the Earth ...
besides, one invites the spirits of late Empresses to take part in this impor-tant festival, so why are only senior male officials allowed to be involved with these sacrifices to a woman? This defies logic and creates dishar-mony where there should be order.’
T’ai-shan was one thousand and eighty-two li, or three hundred and fifty-seven miles, from Luoyang and the journey took forty days. The cortège spread for sixty miles. It comprised military leaders, government officials, soldiers, servants and foreign legates of Turks, Persians, Indians, Koreans, Japanese and others, each with their own entourages. They took sheep and cattle with them to eat on the way and slept in tents and felt yurts.
To bolster the Wu contingent in the ceremony, Wu Wei-liang and his brother Wu Huai-yün, sons of her half-brother Wu Yüan-ch’ing, turned up for the ceremony, though they would have been wiser to have remained in obscurity in the provinces. Also present was T’ai-tsung’s former consort, Wu Chao’s cousin Lady Yan, now the Princess Dowager Yue, who, as oldest surviving royal woman of the clan, was Wu Chao’s assistant.
The sacrifices began at the foot of T’ai-shan on New Year’s Day, year one of Ch’ien Feng – 10 February 666 – with the Empress Wu playing the part of the First Assistant. During the ceremony the mountain itself was ‘to be given a title’, which is what the Feng in the reign name means.
The other part, Ch’ien, is the sign of the male or yang element in The Book of Changes. Taking the male element on herself, Wu Chao then led the second procession to the summit, where the sacrifices were completed the following morning without any unfavourable portents being observed. However, five years after Wu Chao’s death the sage Chang Yüeh said the Emperor had committed sacrilege by allowing the Empress
Wu to participate. This, he said, had led to the fall of the T’ang and the rise of the Chou dynasty.
After the ceremony the imperial cortège toured Shandong, visiting the birthplace of Confucius and the supposed birthplace of Lao-tzu, the founder of Taoism who wrote a two-part book of five thousand charac-ters about the Tao – ‘the Way’ or ‘Supreme Principle’ – and the te – or
‘virtue’. He was much more spiritual than Confucius, who was a practi-cal philosopher. After writing the Tao-te Ching, Lao-tzu was said to have disappeared, though it was thought that he had lived as a recluse for one hundred and fifty to two hundred years and had appeared in other guises down the ages. Once during his lifetime he was said to have met Confu-cius and berated him for his pride and ambition. ConfuConfu-cius, on the other hand, was so impressed by Lao-tzu that he compared him to a flying dragon that rides on the clouds and wind.
Living in the sixth century bc, Lao-tzu was said to have had the surname Li. This came about because, it was said, after seventy-two years in the womb, he was born through his mother’s flank at the foot of a plum tree. So Li, the Chinese for ‘plum’, was chosen as his surname. Conse-quently he was claimed by the T’ang – whose family name was Li – as an ancestor in a proclamation made by T’ai-tsung as early as 637, year eleven Chen Kuan, in an effort to dissociate the T’ang from the Buddhism of the Sui dynasty. During the visit of Kao-tsung and Wu Chao to his putative birthplace, Lao-tzu was honoured with imperial rank and given the lengthy title Supreme Emperor of Mysterious Origin. A memorial hall was erected on the supposed site of his birth to be supervised by two gov-ernment officials. The surrounding county was named the County of the True Source and all those with the surname Li were excused paying taxes for a year.
After four months travelling, the imperial entourage returned to the capital, along with Wu Wei-liang and Wu Huai-yün. It was then that the Empress Wu’s worst fears were realized. Despite her amorous abilities, Wu Chao knew that the lecherous Kao-tsung might replace her with a younger model at any time. Now the Emperor had fallen for her own niece Ho-lan Kuo-ch’u, daughter of Wu Chao’s sister Lady Ho-lan, now Duchess of Han, who had already enjoyed the sexual favours of the Emperor herself. Her name Kuo-ch’u comes from the phrase
yi-nu-kuo-ch’u which means ‘daughter and national beauty’. Ho-lan Kuo-ch’u regularly visited the palace, ostensibly to see her aunt, the Empress Wu, but in fact to carry on an illicit affair with the Emperor. He had already ennobled the girl, making her Duchess of Wei, while her mother was alive. Now he wanted to introduce her into the upper ranks of the imperial concubines. The Empress Wu was now forty-one and the mother of five. She could not hope to compete with a fresh-faced, nubile young woman half her age.
Nevertheless Wu Chao tried to maintain her grip on Kao-tsung by providing him with new and exciting sexual variations. She had mirrors installed around the couch where she used to sport with him in the day-time. One day General Liu Jen-kuei came for an audience. He was hor-rified to see the Emperor sitting alone, flanked by two mirrors, and said,
‘There are not two suns in the sky, nor two rulers on the earth. Now your servants see numerous Sons of Heaven. Is this not a sinister omen?’ The Emperor had the mirrors removed. But Wu Chao had them reinstalled for her own pleasure after his death.
Now some more drastic method of removing the Empress Wu’s rival Ho-lan Kuo-ch’u was called for. At a banquet given by Wu Chao’s mother the Lady of Jung in honour of the Emperor and Empress, Ho-lan Kuo-ch’u collapsed in convulsions and died. The Empress Wu’s nephews Wu Wei-liang and Wu Huai-yün were accused of poisoning her and executed, and the remains of their side of the family were struck off the clan register and exiled to the south. There is some doubt about who was responsible. The Lady of Jung could have done it to secure her position as mother-in-law of the Emperor and, simultaneously, to rid herself of the stepfamily she hated. Another theory is that Wu Wei-lian and Wu Huai-yün did it, aiming to poison Wu Chao and put Hol-lan Kuo-ch’u on the throne in her place. But the dynastic chroniclers say that it was the Empress Wu who laced Ho-lan Kuo-chu’s food with a lethal compound of clay. In the long history of China, other Empresses had risen to power as Wu Chao had, but they had always done it with the backing of a powerful family. Wu Chao had done it in spite of her family. Only her mother could be relied on.
The Empress Wu’s father Wu Shih-huo was now left without a descendent of the male line to make sacrifices in his ancestral shrine, so
the murdered Ho-lan Kuo-ch’u’s brother – and thus the Lady of Jung’s grandson – Ho-lan Min-chih was honoured with the Wu surname, so that he could perform the ancestral rites. But Ho-lan Min-chih proved to be a bad choice. A ne’er-do-well, he lived with his grandmother and, when the Empress Wu’s daughter the Princess Tai-ping visited the Lady of Jung with a number of palace women in attendance, he set about
the murdered Ho-lan Kuo-ch’u’s brother – and thus the Lady of Jung’s grandson – Ho-lan Min-chih was honoured with the Wu surname, so that he could perform the ancestral rites. But Ho-lan Min-chih proved to be a bad choice. A ne’er-do-well, he lived with his grandmother and, when the Empress Wu’s daughter the Princess Tai-ping visited the Lady of Jung with a number of palace women in attendance, he set about