Wu Zetian: the Woman Who Became Emperor of China

Introduction

In the long arc of Chinese imperial history, spanning more than two thousand years and encompassing dozens of dynasties, Wu Zetian stands entirely alone. She is the only woman who ever ruled China not as a regent behind a curtain, not as a temporary caretaker for a minor son, but as emperor in her own right, bearing the full title and exercising the full power of the Son of Heaven. Her life, stretching from 624 to 705 AD, encompassed one of the most extraordinary personal journeys in the history of the ancient world: from the daughter of a timber merchant in the provincial town of Wenshui, to junior concubine in the most powerful court on earth, to empress consort, to regent, and finally to self-proclaimed Holy and Divine Emperor, sole ruler of the most populous and arguably the most sophisticated civilization then existing on the planet.

The Tang Dynasty, in which Wu Zetian spent almost all of her long life, was one of the golden ages of Chinese civilization. It was an era of cosmopolitan splendor, of poetry and painting, of international trade along the Silk Roads, of Buddhist art reaching its most refined expression, and of an imperial examination system that was slowly, imperfectly, beginning to open the doors of government service to men of talent rather than solely to those of aristocratic birth. Wu Zetian did not merely inhabit this world. She shaped it, challenged it, and in significant ways transformed it, leaving behind a legacy so complicated that Chinese historians have been arguing about it ever since.

To the Confucian scholars who dominated Chinese historiography for more than a millennium after her death, Wu Zetian was a monster: a woman who violated the natural order, who manipulated and murdered her way to power, who corrupted the imperial succession, and whose very existence on the throne was an affront to the principles of heaven and earth. Their accounts, written by men with strong ideological reasons to condemn her, portrayed her as sexually insatiable, murderous toward her own children, and tyrannical toward all who crossed her. Modern scholarship, drawing on a broader range of sources and freed from the constraints of Confucian orthodoxy, has produced a far more nuanced picture of a ruler who was, by most standards of her era, an effective and at times brilliant administrator, a patron of the arts and of Buddhism, a reformer of the bureaucratic system, and a military strategist who expanded Chinese power across East Asia.

This article traces Wu Zetian's remarkable life in detail, from her origins in the Tang court through her decades of accumulating power, to her proclamation of a new dynasty and her fifteen years as emperor, and finally to her forced abdication at the age of eighty and her death in the same year. It examines both the realities of her rule as best we can reconstruct them from the available historical sources, and the extraordinary complexity of her legacy in Chinese culture, politics, and memory.

Origins and Early Life

Wu Zetian was born in 624 AD, in the seventh year of the reign of Emperor Gaozu, the founder of the Tang Dynasty. Her birthplace was the county of Wenshui in what is today Shanxi Province, a region that had long been significant in Chinese history as a borderland between the settled agricultural heartland of the Chinese people and the pastoral steppe territories to the north. Her family name, Wu, was an old and respectable surname, though not one belonging to the highest tier of the Chinese aristocracy.