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BOOK REVIEW: Wu Zhao: China’s Only Woman...
BOOK REVIEW: Wu Zhao: China’s Only Woman Emperor by N. Harry Rothschild
THE Empress Wu Zetian (690-704 CE) is the only female ruler in the history of China. Even though there were many important and influential women throughout China’s history, only one ever became the most powerful political figure in the country. She ruled China with complete authority and no one dared to challenge her when she was in control. As soon as her power began to slip though, and immediately after she died, historians began to criticize her rule primarily because she was a woman holding a traditionally male position of power. Wu Zetian’s reign has been highly controversial ever since because later historians just accepted what earlier ones had written on Wu Zetian without considering the bias which might have been motivating the early historians.
N. Harry Rothschild’s book, Wu Zhao: China’s Only Woman Emperor, is a comprehensive work on Wu Zetian. Wu Zhao was her birth name before she took `Wu Zetian’ (“Ruler of the Heavens”) as her name on becoming emperor. Rothschild does not gloss over the difficult aspects of Wu Zetian’s rise to power but places them in context and explains how and why this woman was demonized by the Chinese historians who wrote about her.
He uses primary documents to show how the members of the court felt that nature had been turned upside down because a woman had assumed a man’s role of ultimate authority. Rothschild tells the story of how, when one of her ministers requested in writing that she step aside because she was destroying the fabric of reality by assuming a man’s position, Wu Zetian had him banished to the swamp lands and continued on with her reign. She refused to be controlled by men or the traditions men forced women to follow and believed she was the equal or better of anyone at court.
Review by Emily Mark on AHE
