Wu: The Chinese Empress who schemed, seduced and murdered her way to become a living God

by Jonathan Clements

Instead, Empress Wu's surviving children left her memorial chillingly blank

if she truly were the power behind the throne in the 660s, as her enemies claim, then she should also be held partly responsible for one of the pinnacles of Tang culture.

She was ruthless.

Her enemies claim that she strangled her own newborn daughter, ready to pin the blame on a palace rival. Her defenders scoff at such a story, but must admit the alternative, that this was a woman who was able to take the tragic cot death of her child and turn it to her own insidious advantage.

Women of Wu's rank, the Talents, ostensibly answered directly to the empress herself, although, since she was dead, they may have had more time to make mischief of their own. More precisely, the Talents were responsible for bedding and the provision of linen – they were chambermaids, a role that could often put them within easier reach of the Emperor.

Wu not merely working in the palace, but at the Emperor's side in a paddock, engaging him in conversation on his favourite subject, horses. Wu herself recounted a moment of teenage bravado: When I was serving Taizong, he had a grey horse called Shizicong [Dappled Lion]. It was such an unruly horse that nobody could tame him. I said: 'I can tame him, but I will require three things: a metal whip, an iron rod, and a dagger. I will whip him, then if it does not work, I will strike his neck with the stick and if that does not work, I will cut his throat with the dagger.' Taizong admired my spirit.

Most importantly of all, Wu was a wilful, ambitious girl, not afraid to boast of extreme measures, prepared to suggest that it was better to kill a rebellious horse than let it fight on. She was the epitome of all-or-nothing, one of the most beautiful women in the world, and soon to be facing decade after decade of monastic seclusion, unless she took drastic steps.

Folklore recounts that Gaozong got up at one point to relieve himself, coming back out of the water closet to find that Wu had followed him in to the antechamber. She knelt on the floor before him and offered a water bowl for him to wash his hands. As he did so, he inadvertently splashed her face with water and commented that the 'clear waters have marred your powder'. Wu flirtily replied: 'I accept Heaven's favour of rain and mist,' making a poetic allusion to sexual intercourse. A later, and considerably less reliable, source has Gaozong initiating the wordplay, flicking water at her from the bowl and musing aloud that he has been thinking of an old story in which a prince has sex with a goddess. Wu then replies with a couplet of her own, in which she suggests the pair of them sneak behind the curtains to make love.

it is widely accepted that Wu and Gaozong were intimate before her 'husband' Taizong was dead.

Those women who had borne children to the late emperor went into honourable retirement in a secluded part of the imperial residence. Those other wives and concubines who had not given him a child presented more of a problem, since they could not be permitted to return to public life, to know the touch of another man. Instead, the women of the late emperor were bundled off to a nunnery, there to shave their heads and live out their days in prayer.

Gaozong had several concubines of his own, as well as his chief wife Empress Wang, a woman of a good family with strong ministerial backing. Unfortunately for her, she lacked one essential quality for imperial well-being – she had failed to provide the throne with a male heir. Since it was the duty of the top-ranking wife to provide an heir, she was forced to assume the shaky expedient of adopting one of the new emperor's four sons by other women.

However, an heir so easily made could also be unmade, and this possibility was not lost on Xiao Liangdi, the 'Pure Concubine', who rated herself as the Emperor's favourite, and hoped to persuade him in time to revoke the Crown Prince's status and make her own son Gaozong's heir.

Empress Wang, however, was not one to take her promotion with grace. Her role as the new emperor's chief wife seems to have been defined more by relatives and power-brokers than by any elements of her own personality, which by all accounts was haughty and brusque.

why are sources so keen to stress that it was a Buddhist temple? The religion of choice in Taizong's period, if it was anything at all, was Daoism, while Buddhism, an occupation of the departed Wei dynasty, did not gain true prominence again until later in the rule of Empress Wu herself.

It could be that Wu's place of temporary exile was not that of the other concubines at all, but a special dispensation, perhaps to keep her close to her lover, the new emperor, like a modern mistress sequestered in a nearby apartment. Certainly, if there was ever a cessation in her affair with the new emperor, they were back together within a couple of years, since she had given birth to his son by 652/3. Her hair, supposedly, magically grew back.

The simplest explanation would seem to be that Wu never shaved her head. Instead, she was sent away to the convent as propriety demanded, there to wait until her lover Gaozong found the opportunity to come to the temple on ostensibly 'spiritual' visits.

Empress Wang, friendless and under threat, the Fair Flatterer Wu would be far more useful in the palace itself. Empress Wang had already resigned herself to not being her husband's favourite – Gaozong spent increasingly longer periods at the palace of Xiao Liangdi, where the woman continued to beat down his defences with tales of her son's great intelligence, his superb academic record and how ideal he would be as a better crown prince than the current incumbent. Every night that she kept Gaozong occupied would be another night he was kept away from Pure Concubine Xiao Liangdi, and, should Wu prove so alluring as to completely replace the Pure Concubine in the Emperor's affections, then Empress Wang had the ultimate trump card – she was still the Emperor's chief wife, whereas Wu could always be outed as a fallen woman, undeserving of her place at the palace.

Her official position was that as the lady-in-waiting to Empress Wang herself, who looked forward to seeing the Emperor making many more visits to her own chambers, if only to sneak time with his illicit lover.

It is a sign of the depths of the hatred that the Empress felt for Xiao Liangdi that she was prepared to fight with such a dangerous weapon – one does not need to be a genius to see that the Empress risked making her own situation even worse, introducing a second favourite to the palace, and one who was already pregnant with Gaozong's child.

Able to see his mistress with his chief wife's full approval, Gaozong indulged himself to the best of his abilities – to such an extent that Wu spent most of the ensuing three years pregnant, giving birth to three (or possibly four) children before the end of 656.

In an unlikely alliance, Empress Wang lent support to Xiao Liangdi's claims, the two women uniting in their wish to remove Wu from the palace.

She was able to pre-empt many of their comments and had ready answers for their tests, thanks to the network of palace women, all of whom liked the friendly Wu far more than her rivals.

Shortly afterwards, Gaozong himself came to visit Wu. She took him over to the baby's cradle, only to find that the child was cold and dead. Shrieking in anguish, Wu demanded to know who had been the last to touch the baby. With understandable timidity the handmaids revealed that the last person in the room had been the Empress Wang.

Popular myth in China holds that the murderer was Wu herself, who waited until the Empress had left before heartlessly strangling her own newborn daughter, purely to bring down her main rival. However, not even Wu seems to have been capable of such a terrible deed – in later life, despite all her faults, she avoided causing direct harm to her own children.

It was the final straw, and Gaozong resolved to have the Empress Wang demoted, with the intention of raising his beloved Wu up in her place. The decision, supposedly, had nothing to do with the recent scandal over the dead baby, and was instead based on a much more prosaic concern, that the Empress Wang had yet to provide the Emperor with a male heir. Clearly, the current adopted Crown Prince was no longer suitable, and Wu had somehow managed to even sour the chances of the Pure Concubine Xiao Liangdi's child prodigy.

Empress Wang made the fatal error in summer 655 of listening to her mother, who suggested that desperate times called for desperate measures. The two women turned to sorcery, and were found to be casting spells against Wu herself – the precise nature of the act is not recorded, although it appears to have been some form of sympathetic magic not unlike the sticking of pins in a voodoo doll. A society that placed great value on religion and the spiritual world, whose very basis rested on the Emperor's divine power, also had space for witchcraft and witch-hunts – the casting of spells against the inhabitants of the inner palace was regarded as a form of high treason.

Gaozong instead announced that he would create an all-new title, above the auxiliary wives, but beneath the Empress. This new, special grade was to be the Imperial Concubine, and its first and only recipient was to be his beloved Wu.

This time, the Emperor made it clear that Empress Wang had to go, stating bluntly: 'The Empress Wang has no male heir. Wu does.'

In November, Gaozong issued a decree claiming that, despite their long records of deep enmity, Empress Wang and Xiao Liangdi had been caught plotting against the throne and had planned to poison him. Accordingly, they were stripped of their ranks and former status, and their entire families were to be similarly demoted and punitively shipped to the far south to live out their lives in exile.20 The two women were kept under house arrest, barricaded inside a single pavilion, with only a small opening in the doorway for their meals to be slipped to them. Cunning, poetic insult was added to injury by forcing the two bitter rivals to be cellmates – they now had nobody's company but each other's.

Wu also ordered her half-brothers to be sent away to a distant posting in the provinces. The official spin praised her for her forethought – in fact, Wu had never much liked her siblings, and welcomed the chance to exile them.

However, from the moment the gate was firmly bolted, conditions began to slide. No more servants brought baths or removed chamber pots; fresh clothes were a thing of the past. Without a constant coming and going of eunuchs and handmaidens, their courtyard incarceration swiftly became squalid and unpleasant.

Time passed slowly for the two prisoners, until, a few days later, they heard men at the door of their cell. Someone was pulling away the bricks that barricaded them inside. For a moment, the ladies assumed that Gaozong had had a change of heart, and that, at the very least, their conditions would be improved. However, this turned out to be the cruellest trick of all, as the men at the door were revealed to be servants not of Gaozong, but of Wu. They revealed that they had been ordered to subject both to a hundred lashes – a punishment that could easily kill them.

The former empress refused to let her feelings show. Instead, she bowed three times, and said: 'I wish my former husband every happiness in the future. Bright Virtuous Wu has ensnared the love of His Majesty, nothing remains for me but death. Do as you will.'3 Xiao Liangdi, the Pure Concubine, did not accept her fate with such a serene air. She yelled at her captors: 'Wu is a treacherous fox, who has bewitched the Emperor and now sits on the throne. I hope I shall be reborn as a cat, and the bitch Wu as a rat, that I may bite out her throat.'

Chronicles of the Tang dynasty merely record the meting-out of the women's punishment, after which their hands and feet were hacked off, their maimed extremities repeatedly smashed and broken, and their bleeding bodies dumped in vats of wine, where they took several days to die.

'Now those witches can get drunk to their bones,' Wu is supposed to have said, a strange comment with a meaning seeped in ironic retribution. 'Intoxicated unto the melting of the marrow' appears to have been a contemporary poetic term for an orgasm – Wu's chosen means of execution for her two bedchamber rivals was a brutally literal enactment of sexual ecstasy. The closest possible analogy in a modern English vernacular, deprived of such classical niceties, would be: 'Fuck them both to death.'

However, Wu remained haunted by the deaths of her rivals, and reported many nightmares and hauntings, in which she was convinced she was beset by bleeding apparitions in tattered, stained court gowns, their ankle-length hair matted and filthy through neglect. Wu was troubled enough by her guilt to order the banishment of all cats from the palace. Within a few months, she had decided that Chang'an itself was a bad location and persuaded her imperial husband to relocate the entire court 200 miles east.

The nature of Gaozong's disability in the 660s is unclear. He does not appear to have lost the power of speech, nor his sexual potency, since Wu would bear him two more children, a boy in 662 and a girl around 664.

Gaozong came to rely heavily on Wu in the early 660s, as she became the conduit through which all court documents passed.

Gaozong was still recovering – he appears to have regained most of his faculties by the time of the defeat of the Japanese fleet, but, for much of the Korean conflict, it was Wu who was running the Chinese government.

As Wu might have argued, sex with her was an important part of Gaozong's continued recovery.

They were, she observed, just about to get everything wrong and call disaster down upon her dynasty. Wu argued, first to Gaozong, and, once he acquiesced, to Gaozong's ministers, that the Feng-Shan ceremony had never been correctly held before. Court protocol had missed one vital aspect, which was that the Emperor and his officials were physically qualified to perform only half of it – the sacrifice to Heaven from the mountaintop. This, Wu argued, was fine, because Heaven was masculine: a yang element attended by male spirits. Earth, however, was unquestionably yin, a female element attended by female spirits, and, for the Feng-Shan sacrifice truly to work, the Earth sacrifice at the bottom of the mountain would have to be carried out by women.14 Said Wu: In previous Supreme Sacrifices, the spirits that partook of the offerings were those of former empresses, but the ceremonial duties were performed by male ministers. In the humble opinion of your spouse, this would seem to be an error. Why would we expect the spirits of empresses to manifest before the presence of a male? It seems both improper, and contrary to the nature of the sacred ceremony.

Guochu suddenly began choking. While Gaozong watched in shock, his secret lover collapsed in violent convulsions and died at the table. In the chaos that ensued, Wu pinned the blame on the two cousins, alleging that they had been hoping to poison her, and that it was only an accident that the food intended for her had ended up on the dish of the unfortunate Guochu. The brothers were dragged off for a swift execution, and, as was her wont, Wu exacted further revenge on their afterlife by ordering that their surname be changed on their tombstones from Wu to Fu – 'Viper'.