Subject to Change
I talk to the world's best historians and let them tell the stories. And the stories are wonderful! (And occasionally I change the subject and talk about films, philosophy or whatever!).
Subject to Change
Empress Wu Zetian and the Age of Female Rule
“With the heart of a serpent and the nature of a wolf, she gathered sycophants to her cause and brought destruction to the just. She slew her sister, butchered her brothers, killed her prince, and poisoned her mother. She is hated by men and gods alike.”
Jonathan Clements came back on to talk about his book on Wu Zetian (623–705), the only woman ever to rule China in her own name. Rising from lowly concubine/chambermaid to God-Emperor, she outmanoeuvred courtiers, generals, monks and poets alike - sometimes with charm, sometimes with a knife - and ruled over the empire at the height of the Silk Road.
Jonathan describes Wu’s ascent through the Tang court: a place of whispered plots, divine omens, and women struggling to survive. Along the way we encounter girls on top, a boob-shaped tomb, a harem of 120 pretty boys, dogs on sticks, a honey-trap gone wrong, and an inadvisable attempt to train a cat not to eat a parrot.
A story of power, paranoia, and the perilous art of surviving your own success.
If you find this journey into Tang politics, gender, and myth entertaining and informative then follow the show, share with a friend, and leave a review telling people what bit you liked best.
Hello and welcome to Subject to Change with me, Russell Hawk. My guest today is Jonathan Clements. Jonathan is an historian of East Asia and cultural critic. And I won't do too much introducing this time as Jonathan has been on the podcast a few times now, and I think you all pretty much know him. So anyway, uh welcome back, Jonathan, to the podcast.
SPEAKER_00:Thank you for letting me once more out of the dungeon.
SPEAKER_01:Okay, so today we're talking about Empress Wu of China, about whom you wrote an absolutely fantastic biography. And she was born in the year six two five AD and is a truly remarkable figure in many ways, but not least because not only did she act as the power behind the throne in China for many years, eventually she actually took over and ruled China directly in her own name. And she is the first and she is the only woman to do so. And there's a quote displayed on the cover of the book you wrote, about of which suggests that not everybody was a fan. And the person in question uh writes With the heart of a serpent and the nature of a wolf, she gathered sycophants to her cause and brought destruction to the just. She slew her sister, butchered her brothers, killed her prince, and poisoned her mother. She is hated by men and gods alike. So regardless of how much of that is true, she sounds like a great subject for our podcast.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, it reminds me of a lot of my Goodreads reviews, actually.
SPEAKER_01:You mentioned when we were talking a bit earlier that you'd actually been to see her tomb. So how well preserved is that?
SPEAKER_00:Well, we don't know how the insides are preserved because it hasn't been opened. There's quite a controversial issue, which I think we talked about when we talked spoke about the first emperor, um, about the the the politics of opening a grave in in in China, which is really about can you preserve the materials inside and can you uh and are you gonna find enough stuff that's gonna keep funding your archaeological digs. Very controversially, um the authorities in the region around uh Wu's tomb have said they will not be opening it for at least fifty years. And the reason I think is that uh that there are two possibilities with Wu's tomb. It's one of the biggest tombs in China, it's inside a hollow mountain, it's the only tomb in Chinese uh history to contain two sovereign emperors because she's there with her second husband, who was also an emperor. So, you know, it's either the most opulent and richly put together tomb in Chinese history, or empty. And the risk that it might be empty is is so high that I think they're probably staying away from from opening it for a while. You know, and when you go there, it's it's quite a way outside Xi'an. It's it's about sort of 60 miles outside Xi'an, uh a place called Chenling. And when I when I went there, it was two hours in a taxi. Um the these days you can get the bullet train to Baoji, which is quite close by. And uh you've got this huge mountain and you've got this spirit road that leads up to it, which is flanked by these various statues of animals and ministers and so on. There's a fantastic little cottery of ministers standing at the side to attention, who were statues of the souls of people who were who supposedly left their souls behind when the Gao Zong Emperor was buried there. I'm not quite sure how they felt about that. And that the path up to the tomb is flanked by these massive hills, and one on either side, that look like knockers. And that's not me being weird, they're called Naitoshan, the Nipple Hills, and and supposedly that when the Emperor Galzong was was choosing the site for his burial, he said to Wu, those hills remind me of your chest. This is where I want to spend eternity. So, yes, so it it's it's a very it's a very evocative place because it's so massive and they the statues are so alien as well. I mean they have, for example, statues of ostriches as you go up the um the the spirit road, because the you know the the the rulers of Afghanistan sent ostriches as gifts, and the Chinese were like, Oh, these must be the chicks of rocks, these might or phoenixes or something. Wow, we've never seen these things before. So it's very exotic, it's very evocative of the fact that she was living in a period that was the height of the Silk Road, where China was incredibly diverse, where it was incredibly wealthy because of all this stuff coming in from the West. And so, I mean, you mentioned that she was born in 625 AD, which in China is you know the early Tang dynasty, one of the heights of Chinese civilizations. But you know, what was going on in Europe at that time? I've just looked up on Wikipedia what huge events happened in Britain in the year 625. King Edwin of Northumbria married Ethelberger of Kent, and King Cadfan of Gwyneth died, and he was buried at Clangadwallada, where his memorial stone can still be seen. That's it. That's that's British events for that for that year. You know, so we we're talking about the you know a period before the the state of of England, Scotland, Ireland, and Wales was ever formed. It's kind of around the time that the Anglo-Saxons were rising to prominence. But when you see what was going on in China at the same time, it it really I think helps emphasize that one of the problems you have as historians when you know I'd like to talk about the Middle Ages, I'd like to talk about the Dark Ages. And while the same kind of climate conditions were affecting China during what we would call the Dark Ages, calling it dark is very misleading. Um and that's why there's a kind of separation in history between when when when we talk about medieval history, we we're talking about Europe. Yeah. If you want to talk about medieval Chinese history, it starts earlier, it finishes later, and it's kind of sealed off from the European world. And so it's very difficult to talk in terms of direct influences or or occasional contacts.
SPEAKER_01:But the two itself, I mean, has nobody been inside at all? Can you not can you not tell anything from it?
SPEAKER_00:No, no, no. That's why they're not opening it. Um but I I I haven't heard that that rumour whispered around. The really weird thing about it, um, there's a there's a there's an odd once you know the other tombs around it, there's a very sinister air about it because some of her children were also buried nearby, and they were children with whom she'd spectacularly fallen out with during her life. And it's almost like they've been buried close to her tomb out of spite. Um and the really amazing thing about it is that there are these big stone slabs at the front, one celebrating the Galzong Emperor and his achievements, and there's one which is supposedly for woo. And the idea is that you're supposed to your descendants are supposed to gray engrave on your tombstone all of your great deeds, and her children left it entirely blank. Some people try and put a spin on it and say, Oh, well, she wanted her work her deeds to speak for themselves, but no, it's it's much more malicious than that. After she died, the children who she had domineered uh and dominated for for decades um refuse to say a single word about her.
SPEAKER_01:Okay, so she's born in 625. So you said a bit about what China's like at that time. That's the Tang dynasty. So is this a new dynasty? Is this an old dynasty? What's what's going on?
SPEAKER_00:Well, we remember the Tang dynasty today as being this incredible height of Chinese power. China expand expanded to a very large size, it was united for the first time in hundreds of years, and uh it had uh and its its authority reached famously across the Takalmakan desert to the very edge of what is now modern China. But to put it in a broad historical context, it's it's worth remembering that we have this idea of what China is based on modern borders, and those borders were established in the Qing Dynasty only about two or three hundred years ago. There's this idea in Chinese historiography that China is one big country and it has been that way since the time of the first emperor. But actually, over the last 2,000 years, for about half the time, it has not been ruled by a single emperor. In fact, you know, parts of it have been ruled by foreigners, by invaders. And so after the fall of the Han Dynasty in 200 AD, China was spent 400 years split up into various different petty kingdoms and squib dynasties and empires that never quite got imperial enough. And uh the northern part of it was overrun by by nomads, by um various tribes from the steppes, uh particularly the Xiambei. And the the local Chinese people, the the the Bahan Chinese people, fled south of the Yangtze River, and so you have this kind of division between North and South, which is often repeated in Chinese history, and then you had all of these mini dynasties up at the up at the top, uh the Northern Zhou and the Northern Wei in particular, who were absolutely bonkers, really terrifying stories about them, and really uh often not not well told by history. It's only recently that some of the best books have come out about these people. And eventually a unified China broke out. A very short-lived dynasty called the Sui dynasty managed to seize control of most of what we would now call China, and they they toppled very quickly because it's a huge effort to, you know, a huge financial and manpower effort to to conquer an entire subcontinent like that. And their cousins, the Tang Dynasty, took over. And the thing about the Tang Dynasty is the first emperor of the Tang dynasty was a duke in the um in the in the Sui dynasty, but the real powerhouse of it all was his son, um, who we now call Taizong, the Taizong Emperor. And it was the young Taizong, a man called Li Xi Min, who led this revolt and conquered the nomads uh of of the of the West and conquered the rest of China in his father's name, installed his father on the throne as the first emperor of this new dynasty, and then after a couple of years, he got into a huge fight with his brothers, killed two of them, and then invited his father to abdicate and run off to become a Buddhist monk, and then he became the second emperor of the Tang dynasty. This this real kind of kingmaker figure, Taizong, became the second emperor of the Tang dynasty. And the thing that's really amazing about Taizong, and which affects the story of Wu as well, is that he wasn't just the emperor of China, he was also the Khan of the nomads. And so there's this moment in Chinese history where, you know, for hundreds of years there have been these invaders and there have been these troubles on the border and so on, and he wipes that out by becoming a double king, basically. And so as a result, you have this time of peace and prosperity uh in China, and the wars it fights are either border wars to expand its its uh its territory or inter-Nisign conflicts as as people try and compete for you know power within China. But it you know, it's not a north versus south conflict anymore, but there is a north versus south undercurrent that goes through everything that happens for the next 200 years because Taizung is very, very heavily nomad in his ancestry. He sets himself up as this big Chinese leader, he pays lip service to the idea that you know everything is very hand Chinese now. This is China for the Chinese, the Chinese are back in charge, we're one country, hooray. But actually, deep down there are many elements of his life and his culture that are foreign to the Chinese. And this keeps popping up. And one of them is the role of women, because on the on the steps, the nomads, you know, the women have uh much more power, they hold all the wealth, they command armies, they are much more um pushy, and they have a much bigger sense of uh entitlement. So during the time of Wu, the generation that she grew up in, and the generations after it, you see Chinese chroniclers saying, Oh, women today they're very difficult. They they they go to temple fairs unschaperoned, they ride around on horses wearing trousers, they dress like barbarians, they don't wear veils. Um, there's this entire subgenre of Chinese popular literature called Fearing Your Wife, Wei Chi, about these kind of termagants who are pushing the men around and and and manipulating them. And that kind of misogyny from the Chinese is something that is runs throughout the story of Empress Wu.
SPEAKER_01:Hmm. Okay, so you brought in Wu. When does she arrive in the story? When does she sort of get introduced to the palace? Because obviously, well, I say obviously, but she doesn't start in the palace, does she?
SPEAKER_00:No, she doesn't. She's she's uh she's a rich guy's daughter, she's the daughter of a lumber merchant who's done very well for himself. But her mother was her father's second wife, and so she had these stepbrothers um who were quite pushy about um not really liking the the new arrivals in the family. And uh her sister married quite well, her sister married a government official, and her sister engineered for a way for her to be invited to become one of the servants at the palace. And this was a good deal all round because her her stepbrothers got rid of her, but she was given an entry to a life with with great prospects and and great opulence. She was a very low-ranking palace concubine. Basically, you know, the Taizong Emperor only has one real real wife, and then he has half a dozen subsidiary wives, and then he has half a dozen occasional concubines, and then there are women who work in the palace who do the jobs of men, because men aren't allowed in the palace. And and and so Ru was one of those. She was a talent, which is basically a chambermaid. She was in charge of folding linen and washing clothes. Um And is this system uh I mean, is she a concubine?
SPEAKER_01:Is she uh is she a chambermaid? Is it a very rigid system? Uh I don't really understand how the system works.
SPEAKER_00:Well technically, she's a concubine. That's how she is described uh at the time. But the thing is that these this it's a very complicated situation, uh particularly because in the case of Taizong, his wife his real wife had died, so the position of empress was actually empty at that point. Um the you know he has sexual access to all the women in the palace, no one's gonna stop him because he's the emperor, but also sexual access is very highly controlled because sexual access generates children, and children are heirs, and whoever becomes the next emperor is a big playing piece for all the various people involved. So what you get with with the with the Chinese emperors, uh particularly in the in the Tang dynasty, is that they can't really afford to have just one wife. They need to be able to say to various princes and kings in other countries, oh yes, we'll take one of your daughters to be sort of married to our emperor, because that's how you did diplomacy gets done. And you've also got the various forms of, for want of a better word, sex magic, this idea that to be a truly healthy man, to be an immortal, you need to have sex with multiple partners. And so those women are uh in the palace for that purpose, but you might as well put some of them to work because um there's one point where he has about a hundred concubines, and so you know, even if he was racking up one a night, it was going to take him three months to get through them all, and that's without time off for good behaviour. So, you know, it it it was perfectly possible, it was um in in Wu's case, for example, that she might not only live in the palace for years without attracting his attention, but might not even meet him. But what happened in her case was um she did meet him, she kind of bewitched him. She was only thirteen years old when she arrived in the palace, but within a couple of years, she had bonded with him very strongly about their their interest in horses. You know, as as a as a military man, uh he was obsessed with horses. He actually had um and and you can still see them today in Xi'an. He he had um these kind of bas reliefs made of his favourite horses, the the greatest horses of his life, and and they were put all around the gate of the dark warrior in in Xi'an, and so you can still see some of them in Xi'an today. So, you know, rearing horses, caring for horses, horsey stuff was something they got to chat about, and he called her flair furty flair flirty woo, sorry, fair flirty woo, uh Wu Main Yang. Uh the word for flirt in Chinese is woman plus eyebrow, uh just in case you ever know. Sort of raised eyebrow. Yeah, like a raised eyebrow, a sexy raised eyebrow. Um and there are a few stories about their interactions when she was uh a young girl, and it's believed that they became intimate. This becomes important later on. Um and um so you know, she was this kind of teenage bedmate who kept him happy in his I say in his dotage, he was only in his fifties, I think, when he died, you know, exhausted by all his wars and possibly all his wives. So we have some stories about her her life in the palace at the time, and and and it it's it's to give you a sign of how kind of bewitching she must have been to Taizong, he'd heard a prophecy that there was going to be um a female king who took over the Tang Dynasty and almost brought it to ruin. And he was told that this woman would arise within 30 years, and he was kind of panicky about it, enough that if anyone had the name Wu uh in his staff, he was sending them away. There's a case of one of his soldiers who said, Oh yeah, it's funny, you know, in in order to keep the evil spirits away. When I was a kid, my my um my parents called me Wu Nyang, daughter number five, to kind of scare away the evil spirits from boys. And the entire song's like, right, out, out of the palace, don't want any wu's in here. But everyone thought it was weird because it's Wu Wong, the king, the female king. And he's like, There's no such thing as a female king, this doesn't work. And his soothsayer says, Well, the thing is, is that the woman who will become the female king is in your palace right now. And he's like, Right, well, let's get rid of all the women in the palace. And he's like, No, no, no, no, think about it. If she's in the palace right now, by the time 30 years are gone past and everything kind of kicks off, then she'll be quite old, and so she won't have time to ruin the dynasty. If you kick all the women out now or execute everybody, she will be reincarnated, she'll come back 15 years younger, she will have a whole life ahead of her, a whole career, that she can really ruin your emperor, your empire. So, in a very Taoist way, you know, let's not interfere, his sooth say goes, just do nothing. So if you remember the story about Herod and the the slaughter of the innocents, Herod creates his own problems by trying to kill them all because he's misunderstood the prophecy about the coming Messiah. In this case, the emperor knows the prophecy. He knows everything's gonna fall apart, but he goes, you know what, let's just do nothing. Everything will be fine. I'm off to uh to see that teenage girl I really like. Um fair flirty woo. And at no point does Himon go, you do realize her name's Wu, right? Um so yes, that that's that's Tai Zong's life. And the reason I said it would be important later on is because when Tai Zong dies, she's gonna lose whatever status she has.
SPEAKER_01:So to be clear, she has to leave, you're saying, because she's a concubine, because a concubine is treated as a wife.
SPEAKER_00:That's right. If you've been intimate with the emperor, no other man can touch you. Can you imagine how awful that would be? So all of these all of the women in the palace who he has had sex with are expected to shave their heads and go into a Buddhist nunnery when he dies. And so he gets very ill, you know, he's fading away. As the chambermaid, she's in the room keeping him company, and there's various arguments about was she keeping him company because she was his favourite, or was she keeping him company because it was her job to empty the bedpan? No one's quite sure where things fit there, and this becomes an issue in historiography later on. But uh his son is um is looking he is you know coming to visit him at his bedside, and uh Wu is looking after him, and very famously uh his son Gao Zong was a couple of years younger than Wu. And to put this in context, by the time Tai Zong was dying, Wu would have been about 23, Tai Zong would have been about 20, 21. If you wind it back historically to the point where the teenage Wu would have been his father's favourite, Wu would have been 1617, and Gao Zong would have been this 14-year-old boy absolutely alive with hormones and very and I I get the feeling that he had a bit of a crush on Wu. And one thing led to another, and supposedly at the bedside of the dying Tai Zong, they had sex with each other. And this is a very scurrilous rumour uh that was spread about them, and and I suspect may well be true. So she's having an affair with the crown prince at the bedside of the dying emperor, and and this becomes an issue because I think you can see how she how if you can put yourself in her position, she she's living in a fantastically opulent world. She gets to have the closest thing to a modern existence that we can imagine in in the in the middle of the seventh century. You know, her laundry's done for her, there's food on the table, she's not starving to death, she gets to have nice wine, she has this great life for as long as she is the girlfriend of the ruler. But the moment he dies, shave her head into a nunnery, say prayers for his soul for the rest of her life. It's going to be miserable. She's got maybe 30 or 40 years ahead of her of being stuck in this nunnery.
SPEAKER_01:So I just want to push back a bit on that, because I think you say in your book that uh when Tai Zong took over, he didn't necessarily send them send everybody off to nunneries. He he sent some of them back to their own homes. I'm thinking he's got, I don't know how many concubines, 200 concubines. I mean, how big a monastery are you going to have to find to take them all?
SPEAKER_00:Uh you mean Gao Zong, yes. So when Gao Zong well, so when Gao Zong did take over, a number of the women were sent into a nunnery, a number of them were sent home. Why do you think some of them were able to go home? It's because Taizong had never even met them. Oh, okay. That's how big the palace organization is. So the fact that Wu is sent to a nunnery is kind of proof, if you like, that she could be sexually intimate with Tai Zong. And this is important because two years later, when she comes back into the palace, we've rewritten the record. All that whole affair with Taizong, that's fake news. We're not talking about that anymore. Oh no, no, no. They were friendly and chatty and he liked her a lot, but they never did the deed. And that is why she's allowed to come out of the nunnery and back into the palace.
SPEAKER_01:And who is it that brings her back into the palace? Because I'm not because I think you said I'm not sure it was Gao Zhang. I think it might be Gao Zhang's wife that brings her back.
SPEAKER_00:That's right. That's right. This is the fantastic thing. The obvious thing, you know, if you were pitching this for a for a crappy television channel, you would say, Oh, well, you know, Gao Zong can't get her out of his mind, and so he invites her back into the palace, and they concoct this silly story about how her hair's magically grown back, and and she was never intimate with with Tai Zong. And so it's a uh it's an error in the paperwork, and it's fine for her to come back to the palace now. However, he didn't invite her back. His wife invited her back because his wife, Empress Wong, had failed to produce a male heir. And there was a concubine, the pure concubine, so the second ranked concubine called Xiao Liang Di, and this woman had attracted his attention to the degree that he was neglecting his actual wife. And trapped in this kind of conflict, this this palace conflict with Xiao Langdi, Empress Wong decided to invite Wu back because if anything was going to distract him from Xiao Liang Di, it would be that Wu woman. And the great thing is, is that if Wu ever got his attention more, or tried to get shirty with anybody, the Empress could suddenly remember, oh hang on a minute, you uh Tai Zong, you were you were bat it, weren't you, with Tai Zong. So technically, if you're having sex with his son, that's incest, isn't it? He shouldn't be here at all. You should probably go back into that nunnery. So she you know, Wu is a is a playing piece that Empress Wong uses. You know, she's a honey trap that she invites back into the palace to distract Gao Zong, you know, which which gives you, I think, some idea of the kind of hold that Wu must have had over him. I do think there was a kind of teenage crush element in in Gao Zong about it, but also we are talking about a woman here who is so alluring, so powerful in her ability to uh certainly her her sway that she holds over Gao Zong that you know she is dragged into the palace to be used as this kind of honey trap. And that should give you an idea of the kind of charisma that Wu must have had. And the degree to which she must have fooled Empress Wong by saying, Yeah, sure, that sounds legit. I'll come back into the palace, I won't cause any trouble at all, everything's gonna be fine.
SPEAKER_01:Yes, because as I understand it, it all goes horribly wrong for for Empress Wong because because Wu becomes the number one favourite again. Yes, she does. She does. And so she ends up ganging up with the pure concubine to try and get Wu thrown out.
SPEAKER_00:That's right. And and in fact, what what what ends up happening is is that Wu manages to Sland well, I I suspect Solander, maybe not Solander, uh maybe she just finds out the truth about um Empress Wong and Xiaolang Di, which is that they're trying to use witchcraft to influence the mind of Gao Zong. She gets them accused of various transgressions against the Emperor, and they are thrown into a form of house arrest, which is which is just fantastic. They are they're they are put in a then the palace is divided into courtyards. If you imagine the Forbidden City in Beijing, it's very similar. And so they're put in a in a closed court with each other for company, which must be really smarting after everything that they've said about each other. And they don't have any makeup, they don't have any shampoo. I mean it's not shampoo in the Tang Dennis, they're soapstones, but nevertheless, uh soap berries, but nevertheless they you know they can't really wash, they can't keep themselves looking as beautiful as they as they used to, which must have been a punishment in itself, particularly in a court where that was uh the currency they had. They were fed through a slot in the wall, and they were just kind of left there. And and and this is a means of you know keeping them out of the way, but of not creating the kind of karma and drama that you might have if you had them executed. Um one day Gao Zong is walking around the palace and he hears sobbing from behind the wall, and he he realizes it's Xiaolong Di and Empress Wang, and he's like, Oh my god, I I didn't realise they'd done this to you. You know, he's kind of talking to them through the wall, and then they're like, Oh, please come and get this out. And he's like, I I had no idea that you'd suffered this fate. You know, I thought you were off on a farm somewhere, or you know, you know, you're having a nice time. Um, I'll I'll I'll see I'll see what I can do. I'm I'm ever so sorry this has happened. There's surely some mistake. And he goes pottering off. And uh soon um they hear someone with a with a you know like a mallet trying to knock the wall down, and they're like, Oh, thank god, we're gonna be saved. This is fantastic. And then wall comes down, and in come a bunch of soldiers. They haven't come from Galzong, they've come from Wu. Wu has heard about this encounter and she's gonna deal with it now. Um and so they read out the sentence that Wu has arranged for them. They're gonna be beaten up, they're gonna have their legs and arms broken, their hands and feet cut off, and then they're gonna be thrown into a vat of wine to drown. And just to just to rub it in, she says, Oh, incidentally, after you're dead, I'm gonna change your names to owl and snake, so you'll have terrible karma in the next life. Anyway, I hope you two bitches get drunk to your bones, which is a it's an allusion to classical Chinese poetry. To be drunk to the melting of the marrow is to have an orgasm. She's saying, Fuck you both to death.
unknown:Gosh.
SPEAKER_00:Jeez. Um and and that is why and that is why uh I think Xiaolang Di and the Empress say one of them says, uh, I hope I come back as a cat and that bitch Wu as a rat that I may bite out her throat. So it all gets very serious and hardcore straight away. And then that's with the two rivals removed, and shortly afterwards, Gao Zong says, You know what? I need a new empress. I think Wu is probably the girl for me. And this causes immense ruptions in the court because his ministers are saying to him, Are you sure? I mean, considering the trouble she's already caused, are you really do you really want to get into this? And there's a serious debate at the court about who the next empress should be. There are dozens of potential candidates, lots of noble families with a daughter in the running saying, you know, but you know, she's a nice girl, and and you know, you've already had a son with her, and that could make things easier, and blah blah blah. And uh, and and Gao Song's like, no, no, I I really think Wu Wu is the one. And one minister goes, Listen, she's got a bad reputation, you do not want to go down this road. Wu is trouble, and and we all know it. And and Gao Song goes, Well, I don't know about that. And as he says that, this voice from behind the screen shouts, beat him to death! And and the ministers realize that Wu is sitting behind the screen listening to the whole thing, and everything they've said about her is is you know is is something she's fully aware of. So this creates all kinds of problems uh for the ministers. Wu gets to be the new empress. She's already very popular with Gao Zong. She's borne him several sons. Or um, I think she's had, I think at this point she's had two sons with him, and maybe a daughter, and then after after she's officially the empress, they have a couple more children as well. So this is Wu becoming the you know the the the consort, the the imperial consort of the emperor. She's finally won, she's made it to the top, which is absolutely you know great for her.
SPEAKER_01:I'm guessing she's quite uh the forgiving type and she won't be holding any grudges against the ministers who try to stand in her way.
SPEAKER_00:That's absolutely right. There is absolutely no chance whatsoever of a whole bunch. Of mysterious murders and poisonings soon afterwards. She goes after everyone who spoke against her in various ways. And there there are some amazing stories. I mean, in the interests of clarity, we are omitting the various palace coups and various um attempted revolts that that go on during this period. I I think it's worth mentioning at this point that you have the imperial family and the family that Wu's come from, and her cousins, and her and the in-laws of the previous emperor, and the in-laws of the emperor before that, and every single one of these is a big Game of Thrones style house that wants to run things and is using whoever is married to the emperor as their way into the palace. And so there's very, very strong pressure from all of these factions, the factions of the affines, we call them, which is where we get the word affinity from. The affines are the in-laws of the people in power. They're all trying to get involved. And this manifests itself sometimes as very weird revolts within the palace. Because and you you read in the chronicle, so and so decided he was going to try and murder the emperor, but he didn't get anywhere, and then he was exiled, and then he died mysteriously. But why did that just happen then? Why was it? Sometimes it was anti-Wu stuff. The um the Li family, who were the family of the emperors, were very down on Wu. They really didn't like her at all. And Gao Zhong's brother tried to get Wu removed at one point, and because he was brother-in-law, she couldn't really do anything about him. She sent him away to the provinces to run a province there, and and then when he was there, sent one of her agents over to say, Listen, at some point you're going to be ordered to commit suicide. So if I were you, I just do it now, spare yourself the trouble. And this man, who's the Prince of Cao, hanged himself. He was pressured to hang himself by a man called Xia Yo. Um, and I know that story because years later, Imperial censors were kind of rehabilitating the Prince of Cao's mansion, kind of clearing up, moving his stuff out, and they found that his descendants had been using Xia Yao's skull as a um chamber pot that for for years, possibly generations, the family of the Prince of Sao had been shitting in this man's skull uh in an attempt to um to kind of exercise a form of magic on him in the afterlife. Because if that's how your body's being treated, then imagine what it's doing to your soul in the afterlife. So, yes, anyway, so Wu gets to be the new empress, and she goes after her various uh detractors, and this becomes much easier for her in a way, because not all that long after uh she becomes um the empress, Gao Zong suffers a s what we'll we'll call a stroke. The the the Chinese is Feng Shuen, the the the gusts of confusion. He suffered some kind of debilitating attack that made it difficult for him to walk and difficult for him to speak, not difficult for him to have sex because they had two more children afterwards, but nevertheless, he was he was severely crippled by some kind of attack, and he continued to reign for another 23 years, but Wu had to interpret for him. So after so um I think it's the year 660 is when he struck down by this uh by the this attack, and from 660 right up to 690, well actually, and until 60 from 660 until his death, Wu is next to him in the throne room saying, Listen, uh he just mumbled to me something about how we need to you know increase taxes, or he just told me that that minister that thinks he's really popular isn't popular and needs to be sent to the provinces, and Wu became his interpreter. And this is important because there's a lot of vitriol directed against Wu. There's a lot of attacks on her about her behaviour towards people and her scheming and and and some of the deaths that she caused. But bearing in mind that she was secretly running the empire for for more than two decades, she also presided over the height of the Tang dynasty. So, you know, the height of the Silk Road, the absolute moment of true prosperity. Every victory that China won in that period was under Wu's not very obvious primacy. So for the rest of Gao Zong's life, she got to exploit this in a in a very spectacular way, and and it only fell apart for her when he inconveniently died, which of course then meant that someone else had to take over from him, and that wouldn't be her.
SPEAKER_01:But you make it make it sound like he was, you know, a complete non-entity for almost a few years into his reign, but he did recover a bit, and they were they were having sex a lot. In fact, there's that strange thing in your book, which I didn't completely understand, where there's a reference to him behaving in a way to woo. It said something like he, you know, he abased her body and made her endure shame to please the emperor. Well, goodness me. Yes. I thought the Chinese were, you know, had all sorts of manuals to do all sorts of things. And I'm just wondering what on earth what on earth could it be?
SPEAKER_00:What what did she do that was so terrible? Well, yes, supposedly she would do something that no other woman would, and that was what made Gao Zong so so hot for her in the beginning. I don't imagine that is true, or if it is, it's probably a misinterpreting, a misinterpretation of of some other elements as well. I mean, I I don't want to get too far down this rabbit hole, but it's a fun rabbit hole, so we'll have a go. One possibility is there was some kind of sexual perversion that Gao Zong was really into, really into. Um, the only one that is openly alluded to in the Chronicles is that he wasn't just into Wu, he was into Wu's sister and Wu's niece at the same time, and that um I think he always think he tried to have a go at Wu's mum as well. Uh I mean he was he was very keen on the Wu girls, not just her. And that that is um that's recorded in the Chronicles. So if if that kind of family business was was what the perversion was, um, then that that's very obvious. The other possibility is is that the the whole of everything's been turned on its head, which is that Wu would do something that no one else would do that was terrible. There is a precedent in the history of, I think it's the Northern Zhou, of one of the of um an empress from the Dugu family. The Dugu family are fantastic because there was one guy who had three daughters, and each of those daughters was an empress in a different dynasty. That's kind of how how how busy the fit the the fighting was um uh between the Northern Zhou and then the Sui dynasty and the Tang dynasty, how quickly those dynasties changed, that you could have one generation that was empresses in three dynasties. Anyway, the Empress Dugu infamously enforced something on her husband that the Chinese chroniclers said would destroy the the empire, and that was monogamy. She had a hold on the emperor and said, I want no other wife but me, I don't want any of this concubine business, it's just me. I'm your your permanent bedmate, proper wife, none of these girls come anywhere near you. And and the emperor of the Northern Joe, which is you know only a few decades before the time of Wu, was like, Oh, okay, dear. Um, and the chroniclers were like, This is terrible. We can't have any diplomatic alliances, we're relying on one womb to provide us with the next generation of heirs, and there's no guarantee she'll have any boys, and you know, even if she does, there's no guarantee they won't be weird, and and so that was a huge scandal. And it's very possible that Wu that Wu was trying something very similar with Gao Zhong, you know, keeping other women away from him. The other thing to bear in mind as well is that he had his first feng shun, his first gust of confusion in 660, and he had a much worse attack in 667. And so he wasn't completely crippled for the entirety of the rest of his reign, it went in stages, and after 667, his condition was substantially worse. Right. So so there's that to bear in mind as well.
SPEAKER_01:And the other thing people talk about when they talk about Wu is that she's some sort of proto-feminist. And there's that um ceremony, I think it's the Feng Shan ceremony to carry out, which is a big deal, right?
SPEAKER_00:Oh, it's it's the biggest deal. In Chinese history, there is a ceremony called the Feng Shan Sacrifice. And this is where when the world is perfect, when the Emperor has got everything right, and there's no wars to fight, and no one's poor, and no one's unhappy, and everything's going really well, you report to heaven and you say we're doing okay. And that's called the Feng Shen uh Feng Shan sacrifice, and it's happened, I think, six times in Chinese history over two and a half thousand years. Gosh. What you do is you carve your report in golden letters on jade tablets and you take them to the top of Mount Tai and you report to heaven. Now the trouble is that it's a fantastic propaganda exercise to do it, but it's fraught with peril because if anything goes wrong, then things aren't perfect anymore. So it's fake news. And the problem with the Feng Shen sacrifice is it's so rare that no one knows how to do it. And so if you have a Feng Shen sacrifice, um, it takes you a decade, maybe two decades. It's like a moonshot. You have to plan everything, you have to drag out all the old books, you have to drag in all the researchers and have conferences about what you should do at which point and how you should get stuff done. And they do this for Gao Zhong because I mean they they probably started around the time of Tai Zong, but they got to Gao Zhong, everything's perfect, everything's going really well. I've got this great wife I really like, and everybody loves her because the people who hate her are dead, and everything's going great, and they so they go off to Mount Tai to have the function sacrificed in the year 666. Uh, it's a very memorable number, so I always remember that one, which was the year before he had his second attack. And they get to Mount Tai and they head up the slopes of Mount Tai to do this ceremony, and they're just getting to the top, and Wu puts her foot down in a spectacular way. Um, I think it's worth mentioning at this point that she wasn't just very charismatic, she was also very smart, she was very well read, and they're just getting ready to do the ceremony, and she goes, Point of order, Mr. Chairman. I've been looking at these books, and um, this is a big Taoist ceremony, and Taoism is all about your unity of opposites. It's about yin versus yang, and you've just got a bunch of men doing this ceremony. Surely women should be half this ceremony. And and Gao Zong says, Oh, da and she goes, Hang on, yeah, I've what did you say? Yeah, he says that's right. And so so suddenly out of nowhere they drag in all these serving girls and people's wives and you know tavern wenches from nearby, and they kind of put them in their headdresses and send them out, and and women occupy half the ceremony. And so the Feng Shen sacrifice for the first time in history is male-female. And and Wu goes, this is the thing that you've been missing before. The unity of office, the fact that yin and yang is, you know, have to be halves. It's not all about yang doing everything they want. The yin people have to have a say too. And that is the first very obvious manifestation of what of what you call her her proto-feminism, the idea that Wu would preside over an age in which women would enjoy increasing amounts of power. And if this is an entire sector within Tang studies now, there are there are uh a couple of historians have written whole books about it. Um the one I recommend is Rebecca Doran's Transgressive Typologies. Um and and what Doran says, for example, is that when we talk about Wu, we talk about something the Chinese call the era of female power. Um and and that normally is taken from 690, which is when Wu eventually proclaims herself to be the sovereign empress, the true ruler of China, until 712, which is when her her um her daughter and granddaughter were brought down in this big palace revolt. So that's like a 20, 22-year period where women were in charge. Uh, but Doran says you can also suggest that women have been in charge since about 660. From the moment Gao Zong has his stroke, Wu is running the empire, and she's running it from behind his throne, and subsequently behind her son's throne, and then she's really in charge, and then her daughter, Princess Tai Ping, really wants to be in charge as well, and so does her granddaughter Hanla. And so you have this period which you you could say lasted for 60 or so years, when women really are wearing the trousers, quite literally. And the male establishment, you know, after 20 years, is growing up in an environment where this is normal. Um, and what happens after the death of Wu is you have this massive backlash by Chinese uh historiography, which paints her as this terrible tyrant, which emphasizes everything that she did that was terrible, to desperately try and tamp down the notion that women should be allowed to be in power at all. Oh, you I mean I've I've actually forgotten what the question was first. But oh yeah, proto-feminism. So so and so for me it really begins in 666 when when she she makes this pronouncement on the top of Mount Tai and gets her way, but also establishes, you know, in a in a propagandistic sense, establishes for everyone in the empire to see that if they really want to take Taoism seriously, if they really want to understand the fundamental tenets of Chinese philosophy, men and women need to be equal. And no one's said that before. Everyone's kind of said, oh yes, you know, there's yin and there's yang, and and women are half the sky, and but no one's gone so they should be doing everything, right? They should they they shouldn't just be kept at home. Um and and so Wu that's the that's the argument that Wu makes, and that is the the foundation really, um, of her subsequent career.
SPEAKER_01:I mean you say that she's had her name blackened by history. There's been this big backlash. There's sort of two things in your book which which seem to sort of play off each other uh and seem to be somewhat in contradiction. One is she seems to have not only tolerated but but actually warmed to and enjoyed the company of some very first-class, upstanding, incorruptible administrators. And I'm thinking of somebody like Judge D. For example. But then you have the Office of Prosecutions, which uh seem to have had an absolutely terrifying range of methods to get their you know, presumably very possibly innocent suspect to say whatever it is they want them to say. I mean, do you want to say a bit about the office of prosecutions?
SPEAKER_00:Well, let's do the upstanding ministers first, because I think that's a continuation of the same of the same topic. Um one of the things that uh and actually both those those elements you've outlined, I think are two sides of the same coin, um, which is about the affines again. Because Wu was determined to protect herself and protect uh her her family from assaults from these various affines, from the Li family who hated her, from the the Yang family, who who was actually her cousins, but you know, everybody's got a cousin they want to put in the palace, everyone's got a an uncle they'd like to nominate for this ministerial post. And Wu didn't want to play that game. Even her own family were doing it. The Wu family were saying, Listen, I've got this brother-in-law, and he I think he'd make a really good minister of defence. And Wu's like, I don't care. So she instituted a number of policies which at the time were very radical. For example, anonymous exams. People's names were blanked out of their exams for the civil service. So when that exam was marked, it was marked on what the words said, not what who'd said it. They had a kind of suggestions box where anyone could make a complaint uh or or a um a comment, which was often abused, of course, but but also you know had this kind of openness about it. And she did end up with some fantastically competent ministers. And you mentioned D. Renjier, who was a man from her hometown, actually, I think, uh Judge D. And he's more famous today because he became the subject of a bunch of detective novels uh as Judge D. That's why I use that name for him in my book, and in fact, a series of films as well, Judge D and the and the something of something, and there's a whole bunch of them. Uh but anyway, uh so Judge D, he was a couple of years younger than her, I think, but they were basically the same generation, they got on really well. He had a reputation for speaking truth to power, and he made some very, very good points. He scored some very good points in her presence. The one that I remember most vividly is they were talking about what to do about the border. Um, they were trying to expand the borders of China out to Kashgar, which is where the borders of China are now, and and Judge D said, I don't think we should bother with this. I think that the desert, the sea of death, the clues in the name, is a fantastic barrier to stop people invading us. And so if we just draw the border of China, kind of where not where Xi'an is, but you know, maybe where uh Don Huang is, where the where the the edge of the Great War was it is today. If anyone wants to attack us, they've got to cross the Taclomacan desert. That's gonna be worth a hundred armies. So let's not expand China for the sake of it and have a border we share with the Arabs. Let's roll it back and have a nice little edge. And and this was caused by the fact that the Persian Empire was falling to Muslim conquerors, and so there was this chance that China expanding westward would run into the Arab world, expanding eastward, and they would, as in fact they did, eventually have a have a ding-dong um on the edge. And and Judge D was like, we don't need to do this, we can make them come to us and they'll die of thirst on the way. And that's the kind of vision that Judge D had. And so he was a he was a good minister and he was uh very successful. He did get sent away on several occasions for for putting his foot wrong, but not necessarily at Wu's instigation, other people um trying to undermine him. So this uh meritocracy that Wu introduced was a fantastic opportunity for people who were not part of these big families to get somewhere, and they were a fantastic opportunity for competent people to succeed. The flip side of that, as you mentioned, is uh her office of prosecutions. The naming and shaming, the uh the suggestions box was obviously open to abuse. There's a lot of whispering, there's a lot of insinuation. The affines, these various families, are all bitching about each other, trying to get each other into trouble, and Wu has this enforcement office that's designed to police these things. And several of her enforcers were hated, and I think justifiably so. They would torture people to get confessions to crimes that hadn't existed. One of the torture devices was called I Did It or something. It's like you put someone in this device and they'll say they did it, whatever it was, just to get out of it again. So there are some very corrupt men that made it through her office of prosecutions, because I think that was one of the real one of the rare places where meritocracy might be hidden. You know, if you're good at getting confessions out of people, it doesn't necessarily mean you're good at getting the truth out of them. And I think that was probably um something that Wu hadn't foreseen. So she's settling scores through the Office of Prosecution. The Office of Prosecution is certainly bringing some innocent people into uh disrepute. Um and you know, uh, and there are many cases of the Li family, the Wu family, the Yang family falling foul of these of these senses, and they have a terrible reputation in Chinese history. There was uh when I was writing my book about Chinese food, there was one dish, and I can't remember what it was now, but it was it was intestines and entrails and liver and blood, and it was some kind of inedible thing that was deliberately made inedible, and you didn't eat it, you just spat in it, and that was named after one of the office of prosecution commissars. And the idea was you you'd order a you'd ordered a plate of you know Dave the Torturer and then you'd all spit in it at the table and throw it away. So, yes, they they they were terribly hated. And and and one of the things that was said about Wu after her death throughout history was that she was this terrible dictator, you know, worse than Stalin, worse than Hitler. Nevertheless, I I think it's probably worth mentioning that a number of the attacks on the office of prosecution were themselves from aggrieved people who were annoyed they'd been caught. Um, and also that Chinese emperors throughout history have been awful to everybody. Um, one of the things that is shocking about the the attacks direction on Wu, I'm a bit of a Wu fan. I'm not sure we would have got on if we ever met in real life. I probably would have found her insufferable, but but nevertheless, you know, her achievements are myriad and very impressive and are clearly the work of a woman with amazing charisma and incredible intelligence, and I will not deny any of that. She is blamed for a number of atrocities. She sought forgiveness for them later in life, which I think we should maybe talk about next. But a lot of the accusations that were directed at her were from people clutching their pearls at the possibility that a woman would do these things. Right. Whereas if a man did it, as men so often did, no one batted an eye at it.
SPEAKER_01:I don't want to go down this rabbit hole too much, but there is something, for me at least, slightly shocking about the uh the amount of sort of sophisticated cruelty in China and you know the sophisticated torture. And obviously you see terrible cruelty in Western history and murders and uh hackings to death. But just the sophistication of it and the uh refinement, to my eye, is just it is just it's just horrific.
SPEAKER_00:Yes, it is, and um there are there's a fantastic book about the Northern Way dynasty that came out recently. The author is Scott somebody, I've forgotten his name now, I'm afraid. But he he says at one point he kind of stops at one point and he goes, the the level of atrocity is is appalling and overwhelming. And that's and you know, but uh as you say, you know, this is also the the era of the of the Viking blood eagle, it's not necessarily limited to China alone. Um I think your your your use of the term sophistication is is is very interesting because there are some very odd ways that things pan out for cultural reasons. That there's one guy who was who was severely beaten and given a hundred lashes and left to starve to death. And this was in Wu's era, and this was regarded as a mercy because he would die whole, and therefore in the next life he would, you know, in the afterlife he would be whole, he wouldn't be missing limbs or anything like that. It's a bit like a suspended sentence. It's just the slap on the. The thing that shocks me about Chinese punishments is is the um is the uh annihilation to nine generations, where if someone has committed a truly heinous crime, you won't just kill them and their parents and their kids, but their kids' kids and their cousins, and basically nine levels of relationship. So that's your second cousin and your you know your your your auntie Ethel will wipe them out. And so whenever you see the the the destruction of nine generations, you're seeing the cancelling of an entire family because of something that one of them's done. And that's a a very weird situation. And and one of the things, I mean, every now and then there's a kind of purge in Chinese history, and and Wu's reign was one of these purges where these old families that had been ruling behind the scenes, all this old money that they kept coming for ages, were um ankled out of existence because they were fighting too hard to get in. Um, what Wu eventually did is she she tried to hold off the Li family itself. The Li family, which is the family of the Taizong Emperor, you know, the family that took control of the empire and proclaimed the Tang dynasty, were still trying to interfere even as Wu was in charge. Um and to hold them off, she proclaimed her own dynasty. She said, Right, you know what? We're not the Li family ruling everything anymore, we're the Wu family ruling everything. And you know, she gets quite uh messianic in her old age and and and actually proclaims herself to be the empress. And also she gets obsessed with these fantastic things. There's one thing, um, the word Wu in Chinese is a homonym for parrot. So anything involving parrots would would be kind of uh of great interest to her. Um and the word Li in Chinese, which is the name of her husband's family, um, is also a homophone for a breed of cat. And so uh in the 690s, she got one of her ministers and she said, Big job for you to do. I want you to train this cat and this parrot to eat from the to drink from the same bowl, to prove that cats and parrots, that woos and lee's can get along. And the minister's gone, right? You are, that sounds like a worthwhile use of my time. So off he goes, and he trains this cat and this parrot to not attack each other. And and and Wu says, Right, I'm gonna bring it out, I'm gonna show everybody, and they're all gonna see how you know this is a an example of my reign being one in which everyone can live together peacefully. They bring it out, and the cat's got the parrot in its mouth already and it's eating it. And you had one job, you had one job to do. So in her later life, she she was kind of haunted by some of her misdeeds and and tried to atone for them and got into this fantastic fight with one of her children, her son, uh Li Sien. She had two sons who did who who didn't end up becoming emperor because they got into trouble, and and and Li Sien was the was the kind of first up, I think, because he kind of reached the age of majority while uh around the time of the death of Gao Zong. So he was he was there to go, I guess I'll be taking over now, Mum. And she's like, No, no, no, you're not, because of all the things you do wrong. And he said, Well, what exactly have I done wrong? It turns out that he kept on coming up with these difficult suggestions, and one that um I only found out about quite recently, actually, it's not in my book because I don't I don't think I knew about it at the time. He went to her and he said, Listen, Xiao Liang Di, that girl you had beaten up and and mutilated and drowned and stuff, she had two daughters, and they're 39 years old now, they're they're they're in their 30s, and no one's married them because they're Xiao Liang Di's daughter. And I think it would be a nice gesture if I married them. And we've like, Absolutely not. And you know, she and she she she commanded two of her soldiers to marry these women who are just minding their own business. Um and and so he kind of annoyed her in that sort of way. Meanwhile, Judge D is saying to her, you know, maybe it's time you started to mend a few bridges. There's no point in getting into it now in in any great depth, but you know, she uh after Galzung died, her third son took over, but she deposed him very quickly because of you know he wasn't doing what she wanted, so her fourth son took over, and then when her fourth son um didn't behave in the way she wanted to, she banished him and took over herself.
SPEAKER_01:So hang on. I just want to make be clear about this. So she was sort of the wife of the Taizong Emperor, sort of. Yeah, that's right. She is the wife for sure of Gao Zong Emperor. Of Gao Zong, yeah. She's the emperor, she is the mother of Sun Number, whatever it is, who takes over. The third son, Zhongzong. Yeah, and then she deposes him and another so she's the mother of two emperors and the wife of two emperors, and she is empress on her own. Also an emperor herself.
SPEAKER_00:Yes. Amazing. Um sometimes they say emperor rather than empress because Chinese distinguishes, but English doesn't quite so much between the idea of an empress being an imperial consort and an empress being a sovereign ruler. So sometimes they call her Emperor Wu. Um, that's right. She she so she deposes her two sons and takes over herself because you know you've got you've got a job to do, you might as well do it yourself. And and so she spends 15 years ruling as the empress in her own right, which is an incredible achievement because no one else has ever done it. Um and she she's troubled by bad dreams, she's troubled by dreams about the people that she's wronged. She has a dream about a parrot that has two broken wings, and she says to Judge D, What's that all about? And he goes, Well, I think it's pretty obvious that you know you're the woo, you're woo the parrot, and your two broken wings are the sons you've sent away. And then she has another dream about chess pieces. She goes, Oh, I don't know why I keep dreaming about chess pieces. The word for chess piece in Chinese is z, which is the same as the word for sun. And she goes, He says, You're you've you've wronged your children, and this is going to be a big deal when you die, because if you have no children to make sacrifices in your honour, you will be a restless spirit. And this is when, very late in life, Wu starts to embrace religion in a big way. She kind of gives up on Buddhism, which she's used as a kind of tool for her rule for a decade, and she returns to Taoism, she returns to Chinese native religion, and she desperately tries to start atoning for her misdeeds, to the point where she eventually says, You know what, I know that I've set up my own dynasty and I'm now on the sovereign empress, but when I die, my my third son, Zhong Zong, who's already been emperor once, he will take over again and the dynasty will be restored. I've just done this as a kind of stopgap measure, but once I'm gone, he can take over. Please be nice to me. The kids can come back, it's okay, you don't have to live in the provinces anymore. Sorry about the whole banishing thing. When I die, everything's gonna be fine. Because she needs her children to remember and respect her, otherwise, it's all over for her in the afterlife. But just on the butt but you know, but that's that's the only she she comes up with that scheme after she's failed to become immortal because she meets this guy who says he's 300 years old, and he goes, Yeah, yeah, I'm 300 years old. I'm um you know, I I know, I don't know. A day over 78, but I I'm 300 years old, I've been living on this special potion, and she goes, Well, I'll buy that potion off you then. And he's like, Yes, yes, I'll I'll just knock you up this potion, you know, Empress Wu. And then he scarpers because of course it's just a you know pointless fruit juice. And I think she works that out. She realizes that you know she's she really is on her her last legs, um, you know, she she's fading, her hair is greying, her teeth are falling out, but she realizes there is a possibility for immortality if she behaves like a male emperor. She realizes, you know, she says, you know what, I've just worked this out. An emperor has 120 concubines, and that restores his Yang essence. Well, you know what I should do? I should have 120 male concubines. And everyone's like, Yes, that sounds like a great idea, Empress Wu, yep, fine. And so we then have the office of the crane, which is 120 fiercely pretty boys who are kind of introduced into the palace as her companions in her old age. And again, I think this is funnily enough open to abuse. Some of them are probably perfectly nice young gentlemen who, you know, keep her company uh at dinner and laugh at her jokes and you know, play party games. Some of them are absolute assholes, uh, particularly the Jung brothers. All these terrifying stories about the Jung brothers. I mean, I'll I'll I'll tell you one. I'll tell you one, which is they had this idea that maybe it would be fun to get four dogs and hang them from a post and then release a bunch of hawks into the room. Um, and so the hawks just rip all the flesh off these dogs, but the dogs are still alive and they're howling. Um, and and and it was called the howling. It was this was this kind of game that they had. They they raised a donkey on nothing but but um barbecue sauce and then roasted it alive, and you know, all kinds of weird stuff they were doing because they had infinite wealth and they and they could get away with it. So in the latter years of Empress Wu's life, she had this huge entourage of gigalos, basically. Um and and that causes all kinds of trouble. I mean, very famously her her prime minister Shang Guan Wan Er, who was a she was a slave in the palace because her father had been implicated in the coup many years earlier, but she was a very eloquent woman. She was a great speechwriter, and she became Empress Wu's speechwriter, and she was a um supposedly the greatest poet of her age, but she also had a funny haircut to hide the scar down the side of her face where Wu had gone for her with a fruit knife because they'd had an argument about a boy. So it it's it's a really kind of shocking sort of era to live in.
SPEAKER_01:Um but again it's kind of what you're saying. It's like this this strong sort of female power where you know they seem to have thrown off any restraints from their men folk.
SPEAKER_00:Yes. And and that's another reason why she's regarded as a proto-feminist. I mean, the the real thing that rehabilitated her in in the 20th century was a political act by the wife of Chairman Mao. Uh, in the 1970s, you know, Chairman Mao is getting old and he's ailing and he's clearly going to die at some point. And his wife Jiang Qing, who's their culture minister, so she can declare these things, says, Wouldn't it be great if we started talking about women in history who've taken over from their dead husbands and have done a really good job? And so suddenly you get three or four Wu biographies coming out in swift succession in the late 60s, early 70s, sponsored by Jiang Qing, in order to kind of plant the seed with the Chinese people that when Chairman Mao dies, his ideal successor might be that nice wife of his. Now, of course, it didn't quite work out that way for Jiang Ching, but she had a go.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah. And the other thing I rather liked about Empress Wu, I mean, it's not just that she was uh having this uh these these jiggalos around for her um immortality. I mean she just seemed to love sex with all the uh she has all these mirrors positioned around the bed so she can enjoy watching herself. Yeah, it's is that a true story? I can't remember now. I don't know if it's a true story or not. And and the other problem is of course that bronze mirrors, I mean, how how well can you see in a bronze mirror? I don't know.
SPEAKER_00:Oh, if if a bronze mirror is very, very well polished, it's it's it's incredibly effective. Well, in which case it's a hundred percent true. Yeah. Um and they they use a lot of mirrors in the palace to angle light in as well. So you know the sunlight would come in and there'd be like a hundred mirrors that kind of doubled it and redoubled it to create lighting in the room. Maybe that's where the rumour comes from, I don't know. Maybe where it's come from. See, the thing is with Woods, because there's so much scarrelous rumour about her, and she was a bad girl in history for so many centuries, that there are many fictional stories about her that have become accepted as historical facts. So in Flowers in the Mirror, for example, she is it which is a novel, she she commands blossoms to bloom um in winter, and they do it because they're afraid of her. Not sure that happened, although there may have been some kind of early summer thing that turned into that story. Um, similarly, in the Minganacy, there was a book called The Lord of Perfect Satisfaction, uh, which is about one of the affairs that that Wu had, and there's lots of scarless stories about her, and I suspect the mirror story might be in there, um, if I remember rightly. I mean, she did have um I mean the the Jung brothers were her most famous lovers in her old age, but I think in the 690s she was hanging around with a man called Shui Huay, who was a uh who was a monk, who was one of the purveyors of these kind of immortality treatments, and he became very cocky around the palace because he could, you know, he had Empress Wu's ear. Well, it wasn't her ear, but nevertheless he he he had her. Um there was a court case directed against him about the way he was building uh this this big kind of memorial tower thing, which has since been recreated in in modern day Luoyang. And uh he arrived on horseback in the courtroom because he was that that kind of if you sort of Russell Brand level cockiness. Making a statement. Yes, and making making a big statement. And also, for example, um, you know, her early days were in Chang'an, what is now Xi'an, that's where she spent her life with Tai Zong. Later in life, she moved the whole court 300 miles downriver to Luoyang, which is why there are these huge arguments today about where the Silk Road begins. Does it begin in Luoyang? Does it begin in Xi'an? Because whichever city gets that title gets more tourists. There's this story about her that the reason that she moved from Xi'an to Luoyang was because she couldn't bear the hauntings in the palace of all the people she'd wronged, and so she actually she left what is now Xi'an and moved the court to Luoyang for that reason. That, however, is a very, very unlikely spin on a much more simple issue in Chinese history, which is that if you are running on a lumber-based economy and you have a city with a million people in it, you run out of wood very quickly. Yeah. And it makes sense to up everything and move downriver for a bit and live somewhere else for a while to as a sustainability option. So I I think the movement of the court from um from Chang'an to Luoyang was was was probably quite a mundane thing. I mean, it's still a huge undertaking to move that many people around, but you know, nevertheless, it wasn't because she was haunted by ghosts. Um so you do get some of these stories. I mean, she she's a great story to tell, she's a very compelling historical figure. The characters, not just of her, but of the people around her, are really well-rounded historically. You know, you can see these people when you talk about them. There have been so many um TV shows and films about her which only add to the myths and exploit and change the the fictions around her, which confuses the record somewhat. And and the thing about her today is that she's normally presented as this kind of Cinderella figure because you know she's this girl from her home with two evil stepbrothers who gets you know sent away to the palace and marries a handsome prince and then kills everybody. So it's sort of Cinderella plus some kind of psychopath thing. So Cinderella plus psycho is basically what you get with Empress Wu. Plus the evil queen. Yes, and she does become the evil queen. But you know, there are some um the the Judge D films don't make her the evil queen. The Judge D films have her as a very kind of respected kind of matriarch, this kind of matronly person. Because, of course, Judge D and her her were such friends that he only ever got to see the good side of her.
SPEAKER_01:Okay, so I guess we should bring it uh bring it to an end. Um, I mean, just just briefly, I mean, her her son does manage to depose her right towards the very end. It's sort of some farcical coup where he sort of is persuaded to turn up by being told that only he can stop the coup from happening, so he turns up. Yes.
SPEAKER_00:That's right. That's exactly what happens. It it's it's so so she's in bed uh in in her she's in bed in her palace and you know, getting on with stuff, and there's this kind of banging at the door, and these soldiers come in and they drag out the Jang brothers, who everybody hates, and they execute them in front of her, and she stands kind of towering over these soldiers and goes, How dare you send a hundred men to kill two innocent boys? What's wrong with you people? And and Zhong Zong, who's her her her son, who's has come back to kind of to eventually take over and has been invited to do so, he says, Yeah, I'm I'm I'm sorry about this. Uh that there's a sort of coup going on, and I'm here to stop it. And she goes, Well, stop it then. And he's like, Yeah, sorry, mum. Um, I think I'm emperor now. It it it's it's really kind of it's such an anti-climax. And and she's like, fine, all right. And she kind of stomps back into her palace and and and she kind of goes into retirement and Zhong Zong takes over. But of course, Zong Zong hasn't really taken over, he is being manipulated by the affines. There are, you know, the Li family have finally struck back at Wu, and the Yang family and the Wu family are poking around and trying to get in there as well. And Zhong Zong is is quite heavily dominated by his sister, Princess Tai Ping. So Wu's daughter has this notion that when Wu goes, Tai Ping will take over, and Tai Ping intends um to run things uh from behind the throne, with uh with I think um with Wu's granddaughter, Anne Le, who is another chippy uh chip off the old block. And so uh Wu dies in 705, and uh six or seven years later there is a palace coup in which the men strike back, in which the the various agents of the of the of the era of female power are taken down and beheaded and and uh executed in various ways, and it it falls apart for for Wu's daughters and granddaughters. And from that point onwards, you start to get the anti-Wu chronicles. People say, Oh, it was a terrible time. I mean, we it's so good that we could put a stop to it all, um, because you know you can't have women in charge, it all goes horribly wrong. You know, people start, you know, tying dogs to sticks um and and having hawks attack them if you let women in charge, so we should stop that and we should never do that again. And and and ultimately her her her real successor is her grandson, Xuanzong, uh, who is the son of Zhong Zong, and he takes over. Um he he is very much a chip off the old block of Tai Zong. He's just like him, in fact. He puts his uh his uncle in charge, but he's the real king maker. He has uh a fantastic reign over a wonderful period in Chinese history, but he is ultimately brought down by his love for a woman he can't have, but because he's the emperor, he gets to have her anyway. Uh and that woman is uh Yang Wei Fei, uh Wu's great niece, who was clearly also a chip off the old blog. Um probably worth mentioning, in fact, that they they they looked quite alike. Um Wu, as we have discussed, was a big girl. Um she had you know a big chest and she was curvy and and she had a double chin. And that was a sign of beauty in the Tang Dynasty because it was a very rich age, not just among the women, but also among the men. We don't have Tang Dynasty wrestling in China anymore, but we have it in Japan because sumo wrestling is a Tang dynasty thing and they look like Tang Dynasty, you know, supermodels. Um sumo wrestlers. And so so Fati is beautiful, and we can actually see that in grave goods. One of the really fantastic things about our access to big data now, or metadata I should say, is we can triangulate the history of hairstyles based on what the figurines in tombs look like from year to year. And we can also analyze the um what is considered a desirable body shape. And from about 650, when Wu achieves primacy as the Empress, for the next uh 200 years, fat is beautiful in um the art the art and the statuary that we find in in Tang Dynasty tombs. It's only about 850 that things start to return to the levels they were before, where it's all about neotony and stick-thin kind of wriggly wriggly teenagers. And uh so it it's my it's my belief that um it's Wu's force of personality that made her the ideal woman um for more than a century afterwards.
SPEAKER_01:Okay, well that was fantastic. Um I you know, filled with respect for uh Empress Wu, uh, you know, she's obviously obviously ruthless, but nobody who isn't ruthless is going to survive, and she survived. What how old was she when she died?
SPEAKER_00:Oh, oh you put me on the stop n on the spot now. Hang on. But let's think she died in 705. I've got I've got I've got to get a calculator out to do this now, because you've She died in seven she died in 705 and she was born in 623 or 625, and for some reason my Okay, I'm just doing this on you this is live calculating. 705 minus let's call it 625. So she would have been 80 or 80 or This is no way to bring a podcast. This is unprofessional. We've got to do better. No, it's not. It's awful waste of time. Well, anyway, I found out now, so uh I can answer your question. Uh yeah, she was 80, 80 and change when she died.
SPEAKER_01:Hmm. Well, anyway, um you know, I think uh I think she was fantastic. I think the story's fantastic, and I thoroughly recommend people to get the book, which is called unimaginatively, if you don't mind me saying so, Jonathan, it's called Woo.
SPEAKER_00:So so go go go Yes, that's caused me a lot of trouble over the years. Go get it. Okay, thank you so much, Jonathan. Thank you. Right, you can edit that so it's not awful.