Empress Wu Zetian

Rise at court

Wu Zhao was the daughter of Wu Shihuo, a timber merchant from Shanxi who backed Li Yuan, the founder of the Tang, and rose to high office under him. Her mother came from the Yang family, kin to the fallen Sui imperial house. Around 637 she entered the palace of Emperor Taizong as a concubine of the fifth rank (cairen), a modest position she held for more than a decade without bearing a child.

When Taizong died in 649, his childless consorts were sent to a Buddhist convent, as custom required. Wu did not stay there long. His son and successor had come to know her while his father was still alive, and by the early 650s she was back in the palace as the new emperor’s consort. Within a few years she had displaced both the empress, Lady Wang, and the favoured Consort Xiao. In 655 the emperor deposed Empress Wang and made Wu empress, against the open opposition of the senior statesmen Zhangsun Wuji and Chu Suiliang. Both were soon removed: Chu died in exile, and Zhangsun was forced to take his own life in 659. The deposed empress and Consort Xiao were killed in confinement shortly after Wu’s elevation.

Later historians charged her with worse crimes on the way to power, including the death of her own infant daughter. Those accounts were written by men hostile to her, and they can be neither proved nor dismissed.

Empress beside Gaozong

From about 660 Emperor Gaozong suffered from a lasting illness that affected his sight, and Wu increasingly read and decided state papers on his behalf. Courtiers came to speak of the ‘Two Sages’ (er sheng), and in 674 the couple took the titles Heavenly Emperor and Heavenly Empress. In the same year she put forward twelve proposals for government, among them the promotion of agriculture and sericulture, lighter taxes and labour service, fewer military campaigns, and full mourning for a mother even when the father was still living.

These were years of military success abroad. Tang armies, allied with the Korean kingdom of Silla, destroyed Baekje in 660 and Goguryeo in 668. At home, the succession was troubled. Her eldest son, the crown prince Li Hong, died in 675; his brother Li Xian was deposed in 680 on a charge of plotting rebellion, and the third son, Li Zhe, became heir.

Empress dowager, 683–690

Gaozong died at Luoyang at the end of 683. Li Zhe succeeded him as Emperor Zhongzong but was removed in early 684, after less than two months, when he spoke of handing the empire to his father-in-law, Wei Xuanzhen. Wu installed her youngest son, Li Dan, as Emperor Ruizong, kept him apart in the inner palace and governed in her own right as empress dowager.

Opposition came quickly. In 684 Li Jingye, grandson of the great general Li Ji, raised a rebellion at Yangzhou, for which the poet Luo Binwang wrote a famous manifesto against her; it was crushed within about three months. In 688 several Tang princes rose and were defeated in turn, and many members of the imperial Li clan were killed or exiled in the purges that followed. To find her enemies she encouraged denunciations, setting up bronze boxes for secret petitions in 686, and gave wide powers to investigators such as Lai Junchen and Zhou Xing, whose cruelty became notorious.

She also moved the centre of government east. Luoyang was renamed Shendu, the ‘Divine Capital’, in 684, and at the end of the 680s a vast Mingtang, or Hall of Light, was completed there as the ritual heart of her rule.

The Zhou dynasty

In the autumn of 690, after a carefully managed series of petitions and auspicious omens, Ruizong stood aside and Wu took the throne as emperor (huangdi) of a new dynasty, the Zhou, named after the ancient house revered by Confucius. Ruizong became heir under the surname Wu. She remains the only woman in Chinese history to have reigned as emperor in her own name.

For years the succession hung between her own sons and her Wu nephews, notably Wu Chengsi and Wu Sansi, whom she raised to high rank. In 698, persuaded by the chancellor Di Renjie among others, she recalled Li Zhe from exile and made him crown prince again, which settled the throne on the Li line.

Around the time of her accession she introduced a set of newly devised characters, among them 曌, the form of her own name, which shows the sun and moon above the sky. They appear on stone epitaphs and other inscriptions of her reign and largely fell out of use after 705, so their presence helps to date inscribed material. The name Zetian itself comes from the honorific title she received on her abdication.

Government and the examinations

Wu’s government was capable and merciless in equal measure. Chancellors were appointed and dismissed in quick succession, and several were executed. Yet she recognised ability. Di Renjie served her as a trusted chancellor, and men such as Yao Chong and Song Jing, later the leading ministers of Emperor Xuanzong’s Kaiyuan era, rose to prominence under her.

She widened the route into office through the civil service examinations. In 690 she questioned candidates in person, a precedent for the palace examination that the Song later made permanent, and in 702 she created a military examination to select officers. Historians have long argued that she used the examinations to build a following outside the great aristocratic families of the northwest. How far that changed the character of the bureaucracy is still debated, but more men entered government through the jinshi degree in her time than before.

On the frontiers her record was mixed. Her armies recovered the Four Garrisons of the Tarim Basin from Tibet in 692, but a Khitan rising in 696 and raids by the revived Eastern Turks exposed serious weaknesses in the north.

Buddhism and patronage

Buddhism gave her rule a legitimacy that Confucian tradition could not. In 690 a group of monks presented a commentary on the Great Cloud Sutra that was read as foretelling a female ruler, and she ordered a Great Cloud temple to be founded in every prefecture. In 691 Buddhism was ranked above Daoism at court.

Her patronage left some of the finest monuments of Tang Buddhist art. At the Longmen caves outside Luoyang, the colossal seated Vairocana Buddha of the Fengxian temple was completed in 675; an inscription records that she gave twenty thousand strings of cash from her own allowance towards it. She sponsored a new translation of the Avatamsaka Sutra by the Khotanese monk Śikṣānanda, completed in 699, heard the Huayan master Fazang expound its teaching, welcomed the pilgrim Yijing on his return from India in 695, and invited the Chan master Shenxiu to court. Her favourite, the monk Xue Huaiyi, oversaw the building of the Mingtang and a great hall for a colossal Buddha behind it, both of which burned in 695.

Ceramics and the arts of her time

Tang sancai, the lead-glazed earthenware splashed and dappled in amber, green and cream, was at its height in the late seventh and early eighth centuries, the decades of her rule and the reigns that followed. These wares were made for burial rather than daily use, and the kilns at Gongxian in Henan, close to Luoyang, supplied many of the tombs of the eastern capital. Tang regulations graded the number of tomb figures by the rank of the deceased, so the grandest sets came from the burials of the imperial family and the high nobility.

The clearest picture of court taste at the end of her reign comes from the tombs near Qianling, where her son Li Xian and her grandchildren Prince Yide and Princess Yongtai were reburied with honour in 706. Excavated in the 1960s and 1970s, they contained painted murals of attendants and processions together with large groups of glazed and painted figures. Court ladies of this period are slender and high-waisted; the fuller figures often associated with Tang sancai belong to the following decades. Blue glaze, coloured with cobalt, was used sparingly and marks the more costly pieces. Our page on Tang dynasty art and inventions places these wares in a wider setting.

Fall in 705 and legacy

In her last years Wu relied heavily on two young favourites, the brothers Zhang Yizhi and Zhang Changzong, whose influence alarmed the court. Early in 705, when she was over eighty and ill, the chancellor Zhang Jianzhi, with Cui Xuanwei, Huan Yanfan, Jing Hui and Yuan Shuji, led palace troops into the Luoyang palace with the crown prince, killed the Zhang brothers and forced her to abdicate. Li Zhe returned to the throne, beginning the second reign of Emperor Zhongzong, and the Tang was restored.

She was moved to the Shangyang Palace, given the title Zetian Dasheng Huangdi, and died there at the end of 705. Her final edict asked that she be remembered as empress rather than emperor. In 706 she was buried beside Gaozong at Qianling, northwest of Chang’an, where the great stele traditionally associated with her stands without an inscription.

Confucian historians condemned her as a usurper, yet both official histories of the Tang give her a basic annal of her own, as they do for emperors. Her Zhou dynasty lasted fifteen years, but the half century in which she held power shaped the officials, the institutions and the Buddhist art of the Tang at its height.