The History of China - #87 - Tang 6: Femme Fatale

Episode Date: January 13, 2016

With Taizong of Tang's death, his ninth son Li Zhi will ascend to the throne as Emperor Gaozong. But his weak will will ensure that his reign will be dominated by those around him. First by his ministerial backers, but more and more by a seductive young concubine who will do anything to win the game of intrigue at the imperial court, and will ruthlessly dispose of anyone who gets in her way. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

You're listening to an Airwave Media Podcast. The French Revolution set Europe ablaze. It was an age of enlightenment and progress, but also of tyranny and oppression. It was an age of glory and an age of tragedy. One man stood above it all. This was the Age of Napoleon. I'm Everett Rummage, host of the Age of Napoleon podcast. Join me as I examine the life and times of one of the most fascinating and enigmatic

characters in modern history. Look for the Age of Napoleon wherever you find your podcasts. Hello, and welcome to the History of China. Episode 87, Femme Fatale. Last time, we concluded our run with Emperor Taizong and his unprecedented reign of Zhenguang, resulting in massive territorial gains, domestic tranquility, and a rock-solid government. This was only slightly marred by the second epic failure of China to invade Goguryeo, and that whole kerfuffle when the three of his sons tried

to kill him and each other to get to the throne. Details, details. Regardless, with his death in the year 649, the throne of Tang passed to his ninth son, Li Zhi, who would ascend as Emperor Gao Zong, which I should note that, like his father and grandfather before him, was his temple name, not his posthumous name, like most emperors we've come to know and love before the Tang. You may recall from last episode that Li Zhi, i.e. Gao Zong, was an odd choice indeed to have become the heir to the throne, much less the emperor outright. He was only tapped, after all, after three of his elder brothers had either been executed or banished for treason, and then only reluctantly agreed to by his father, Tai Zong, through the unrelenting arguments of his chief chancellor and trusted confidant,

Zhang Sunwu Ji. Now, Chancellor Zhang Sun is going to be playing a significant role in the episode to come, so let's just make the time to reintroduce him now. He has earned his place in the highest echelons of the imperial court by playing an instrumental role in the succession struggle at Xuanwu Gate back in 626, the focus, as it were, of episode 83. Once his preferred candidate, Taizong, was safely nestled on the throne, he was been the following two decades and change, getting himself as close to it as he possibly could, and for his efforts had been ranked first among all of Taizong's advisors in the last years of the monarch's life. Oh yeah, and he was also Taizong's brother-in-law,

since his sister had been taken as the empress. All of this to say, Zhang Senwu Ji was very, very comfortable in his position of being only one step below the throne, and so, with his recommendation, nay, insistence, that Li Zhi be made the heir in 643, it's very likely that he did so only to ensure his own continued domination of the imperial court, and given their age discrepancy, and the fact that he was the new emperor's uncle, the monarch as well. So he wasn't backing the strongest or most decisive or best candidate in any real regard, and would actually in fact block Taizong from swapping Zhe out for one of the more forceful and militaristic of his sons. But instead, he wanted a candidate that would be weak-willed enough for him to control. And he would be right. In spite of Taizong drafting what was in essence a

ruling-the-empire-for-dummies handbook in the form of the Difan manual he had left for his heir, Gaozong would indeed prove to be a largely well-meaning and agreeable, but indecisive and ineffectual ruler in his own right, who was utterly incapable of filling the shoes of his forceful father's intensely personal style of rule. Throughout his reign, as those around him argued and made decisions of national importance, his default response would be to, in the words of Song Dynasty historian Wang Pu, quote, fold his hands and say nothing, end quote.

As such, though today we will be marching through the reign of Gaozong, it's not actually going to be his story in any meaningful sense. Instead, it will be that of those around him. First, a small cabal of insider ministers, and then whittled on down to two competing forces, and finally, to only one that would dominate his time on the throne, and in time, usurp it for her self. So, let's get right down to it, and introduce Xi who will be ours and China's main focus for decades to come. Strikingly beautiful, voraciously sexual, extremely intelligent, and absolutely ruthless. Without further ado, introducing the former imperial consort of Taizong, Wu Zhao.

Wu Zhao, for all her historical fame and infamy, actually has remarkably little solid information about much of her life. This is primarily because those tasked to write about it would prove remarkably unreliable. Howard Weschler explains, quote, Everything concerning the remarkable woman is surrounded by doubts, for she stood for everything to which the ideals of the Confucian scholar-official class was opposed—feminine interference in public affairs, government by arbitrary personal whim, the deliberate exploitation of factionalism, ruthless personal vendettas, political manipulation and complete disregard of ethics and principles.

From the very first, the historical record of her reign has been hostile, biased, and curiously fragmentary and incomplete. Less is known of the details of political life during her half-century of dominance than of any comparable period of the Tang." So, needless to say, we must tread with a special caution among the stories about the woman who would be the Empress Wu, because in the realm of historical character assassination, you'll be hard-pressed to find a greater victim. As far as can be discerned, she was born sometime between 624 and 627, and in either the capital city, Chang'an, or more popularly in the far-flung region of Sichuan.

This seemingly inauspicious location, farm country as it were, has given rise to probably one of the first great misunderstandings or misrepresentations about the Lady Wu Zhao, one that has been used by her detractors and champions alike, the idea that she was of the people or of common birth. There is some reason to this assertion. She was the daughter of a man named Wu Shihao, who had been both an early backer of Gao Du's rebellion against the Sui, but who had made his personal fortune as a lumber merchant.

And here's where the stories get crossed. Aha, have said many an imperial Confucian purist, whom you may recall ranked the commercial class as the lowest of the low, even below farmers. Empress Wu was nothing but a commoner. No wonder she caused such havoc. On the other hand, and far more recently, the other side of the coin has been from the Marxist viewpoint, which was, aha, she was a woman of the people, from humble origins, who was seeking to shake up the blue-blooded ruling class and impose meritocratic reforms

to a despotic system. Both, seen from their respective viewpoints, can seem convincing. But both are wrong, because neither takes in the full situation surrounding Wu Zhao's lineage, or even the true position of her father. He was no commoner. Instead, he was the fourth son of a clan that was regionally prominent in Taiyuan at the time of the Great Uprising. But being the fourth son, he was not entitled to take the imperial examinations, as had his elder brothers. So right out of the gate, the Wu's were not some peasant merchant family, but of noble lineage, who had just had too many sons to send them all to academy. Then, with Wu Shihou's successful encouragement and backing of Gao Zhu's rebellion, he would be swiftly promoted within the newborn Tang command chain to become the president of the Board of Works.

So, bam, now he too is a collateral line of the formerly imperial Yang clan, the rulers of the now-deposed Sui. So instead of hailing the rise of some merchant class into high government, Wu Zhao's lineage was really a member of minor nobility marrying a minor princess. So no, not exactly of the people at all. As not only nobility, but stunningly wealthy thanks to her father's successes in the lumber industry, the Wu family was able to employ several domestic servants to raise young Wu Zhao and her siblings, as well as tend to the needs of

their estate. In essence, she grew up a rich kid, and as such had little need to learn any of the normal household tasks a woman of lesser station would be expected. Instead, her parents encouraged Zhao to learn to read, study, and pursue her own education, which might sound completely normal to you and me, but was absolutely unheard of at the time. This would mark Wu Zhao from the outset as a step apart from most other women of the era. Her parents not only allowed, but outright encouraged her own education. Thus, she became well-versed in the works on politics, governance, culture, music, poetry, literature, and a whole host of other fields that were at the time almost the sole

realm of learned men. And it's here that we get the first hints of the characteristics that would make her so endlessly fascinating and so endlessly reviled across time. That she had the audacity to dare tread where only men were welcome, and then to repeatedly and unapologetically beat them at their own games. At the age of 14, in the year 638, Wu Zhao was selected to become one of Emperor Taizong's newest concubines. She was named as one of the Nine Cairen, or Talented Ladies, the fifth of eight ranks among imperial consorts. And just to throw this into a little bit of perspective here, she was 14 and he was about 40. Even so, it probably is at least a little bit less sketchy than the age differential might make it sound, because her duties first and foremost were to

essentially act as a secretary within the palace. In fact, one of the formal designations for imperial concubines of the Tang was neiguan, or inner officials. Nevertheless, it is clear that the emperor was fairly smitten with the youthful beauty, as he would give her a new name, Wu Mei, or Wu Meiniang, meaning the pretty one. Many Chinese thereafter, and even today, refer to the young Wu by this name, Wu Mei or Wu Meiniang, as a result of this change. It remains up in the air, though, as to whether or not she ever had sexual relations with the

Emperor Taizong, though such charges would be leveled against her in the years to come. Still, the thought alone is enough to give you the willies. Her entrance into the palace and the imperial harem would have occurred when young Prince Li Zhi, he who would be Emperor Gaozong, was only nine or ten years old, though initially they would have only seen each other in passing and at perfunctory functions. In fact, he probably had almost no contact with the concubine until he, now as the crown prince, was moved into the quarters adjacent to his father and his many wives in 646. Once there, however, the relationship between the concubine

and the crown prince seemed to have blossomed, to one extent or another. Though the actual goings-on of the inner imperial chambers are, for obvious reasons, completely unrecorded, classical histories have darkly intoned that Li Zhi and Wu Zhao may have in fact been intimate well before Taizong's death, a practice that, if one is to believe it, would have been considered well and truly vile and incestuous by the values of the era. She was, after all, technically his aunt. Such tales must, of course, be taken with a liberal dosage of salt, given the prejudices of those who would propagate such tales. Still, the idea of the two becoming quite close prior to Taizong's death certainly does help explain the events that will

come shortly after it. When Emperor Taizong died in 649, and his son ascended to the throne before his father's very coffin, there was a very different fate awaiting Consort Wu, along with the rest of the departed monarch's collection of wives. It would be a much better fate than that of, say, Qin Shi Huang's wives a millennia prior, who had all been buried alive in their rotted husband's mercury-filled tomb, but it was still going to be no walk in the park. It had been long-standing custom for the imperial consorts, upon the death of their lord husband, to take vows of Buddhist nunnery and shave their heads in tonsure before being sequestered away in monasteries for the remainder of their lives of meditation and prayer.

Such a fate might have been alright with consorts who were middle-aged or beyond, but as for Wu Zhao, or now Wu Mei, she was barely into her twenties when Taizong died, and in no great hurry to give up the world or ponder the infinite and all that. I personally think of it a little like Daenerys Targaryen from the Game of Thrones, when her husband, Khal Drogo, succumbed to his infection, and she was expected to join the former Khaleesi's at Vyse Dothrak. Well, Dany had dragons to get her out of that situation, whereas Wu would have no such supernatural aid, only her own wits, and as would happen, a lot of luck. According to the traditional accounts, she would indeed be forced to the awaiting monastery,

and her beautiful, long, ebony hair shorn bald in traditional Buddhist tonsure. There she remained, for what was supposed to be the rest of her life, when who should arrive a few years later but Emperor Gaozong to pay respects on his father's anniversary? When he saw Wu Mei, he was overcome with an intense passion for her. And when his Empress Wang learned of this development, she saw it as a way to potentially outmaneuver her chief rival at court, the prime consort Xiao, who had been angling for their husband's favor. Convinced that adding yet another beauty to his harem would introduce a rivalry between consort Xiao and the newcomer, Wu, thereby securing her own place at the emperor's side,

Empress Wang sent a missive to the monastery, commanding Wu Mei to allow her hair to grow out once again. She then persuaded her husband to summon Wu back to the palace and reinstate her, this time promoted from her former fifth rank, Cai Ren, to now the highest rank of the nine official concubines, called Zhao Yi. She was now only below the four official consorts and the empress herself. Empress Wang thought she had introduced a snake to nip at the tail of another slithering toward her. But what she would learn, far too late, was that instead of a snake, she had brought back into court a dragon that would devour them all.

Or maybe it didn't go that way at all. There has been at least one 20th century historian, Li Xutong, who argued that among many alterations and fabrications wrought upon the historical accounts, even by those writing them as they happened, was the story that Wu Mei ever left the imperial court at all. Instead, he posits that Consort Wu was spared the tonsure and cloister by the newly enthroned Emperor Gaozong immediately upon his accession, an act which flew in the face of all sense of propriety or rules of conduct. This telling would certainly seem more in line with the assertion that Gaozong and Wumei had

been carrying on an illicit love affair behind Taizong's back, rather than being rediscovered once already in the monastery. Nevertheless, as Weschler notes, quote, evidence for the whole story is so suspect that it seems unlikely the truth can ever be established, end quote. So we don't know exactly when she returned to the palace, or indeed if she ever left at all. Sima Guang put that date at 652, but that can't be right, because she's also listed as giving birth to two of Gaozong's children before that year. But regardless of when she was able to turn her charms on the emperor, Gaozong soon found himself utterly at their mercy. And as for the Empress Wang and her erstwhile opponent, Consort Xiao,

they too found themselves completely outclassed by not only her ability to control the emperor himself, but also in the art of intrigue and guile. 400 years ago, a trio of tiny kingdoms were perched on some damp islands off the coast of Europe. Within three short centuries, these islands would become the centre of an empire which ruled a quarter of the globe and on which the sun never set. I'm Samuel Hume, a historian of the British Empire, and my podcast Pax Britannica follows the people and events that built that empire into a global superpower. Listen to Season 1 to hear about England's first attempts at empire building, in Ireland, in North America and in the Caribbean, the first steps of the East India Company and the political battles between King and Parliament.

Listen to Season 2 to hear about the chaotic years of civil war, revolution and regicide, which rocked the Three Kingdoms and the Fledgling Empire. In Season 3, we see how Lord Protector Oliver Cromwell ruled the powerful Commonwealth and challenged the Dutch and the Spanish for the wealth and power of the Americas and Asia. Learn the history of the British Empire by listening to Pax Britannica everywhere you find your podcasts, or go to pod.link slash pax. Empress Wong, seeing that this new fish in the pond was turning out to be a very dangerous proposition, indeed, attempted to turn the tide by banding together with Xiao and her fellow consorts, whom, as we just noted, had only just been the bitterest of rivals to take Consort Wu

out. Not through violence, not yet, anyway, but rather through slanderous allegations. This strategy, however, would wind up backfiring terribly when Wu Mei was able to almost effortlessly co-opt those both within and outside of the palace that the Empress thought she had been able to rely upon. Up until this point, Empress Wang had felt herself well and truly above all the other palace ladies and servants, and had treated them with the according haughty disdain. So when Wu came in with honeyed words and not a bad thing to say about anyone, it's easy to imagine why so many warmed to her quickly. Those who could not be swayed with words could instead be bought with

coin, and Wu liberally bribed her fellow concubines to act as her personal spy network to outmaneuver the Empress and the Prime Consort. Through it all, as the palace intrigue war raged on behind silk curtains, Emperor Gaozong only grew more smitten with his consort, Wu Mei, and promoted her up several more times in rapid succession, until, by 654, she would have unseated the prime consort herself and occupied the step just below the empress. She had closed at last, to within striking distance of the ultimate prize a woman of the palace could hope for, the title of Empress itself. There was just one minor, almost trivial, little detail left. The fact that the title of Empress was already taken, and its holder, Wang, wasn't about to easily part with her position at the Emperor's side. In spite of his obvious favor for Wu, Emperor Gaozong seemed to have no intention of replacing

his empress with his consort, however sumptuous she might be. Empress Wang was, after all, politically extremely valuable. As the scion of the nationally powerful Wang clan, the empress had had the backing and support of the most powerful elder statesmen across the empire and within the imperial court. It would be almost impossible for anyone to unseat her, because it would be politically costly for the emperor to do so without the gravest of reasons. Almost impossible. Almost. That same year, 654, Consort Wu had a third child, this time a baby girl. And here is where the story gets particularly tragic, and potentially horrific. The tragedy was that the infant girl died. The horror lies in how that might have come to pass. It is of course speculative, as is much of

this story, but Weschler alleges in the Cambridge History of China that Consort Wu may have used her own daughter's life as a trump card against the Empress Wang. The Empress, herself childless, frequently played with the children of the other imperial consorts, and she seems to have been particularly fond of the infant girl. One day, after the Empress had finished her playtime with the girl, quote, Wu secretly smothered the infant. When the Emperor arrived, Wu pretended to be in good spirits and went to show his daughter to him, feigning surprise when it was discovered that she was dead. Servants informed the Emperor that the Empress Wang had just been playing with the dead child,

and Gaozong was left to draw the obvious conclusion. End quote. Left without an alibi, she had indeed just been playing with the child. The Empress was at a loss as to how to defend herself. And Emperor Gaozong, whatever his personal thoughts on the matter might have been, felt he had little choice but to accept what apparently had happened. that the Empress had, in a fit of jealousy, killed one of her rival's children in cold blood. No one could have possibly suspected that a mother herself could do anything so monstrous. That certainly has been the popular telling, and the one presented as fact in the Cambridge history. But it is, once again, pure speculation. Yeah, it's possible that Wong did exactly what she was accused of doing.

After all, a woman of Wu's mental might would surely have other methods than infanticide of her own child to dethrone Wong. But if we cut with Occam's razor, probably the least convoluted, and thus most likely, explanation is that the infant simply died. Crib death, sudden infant death syndrome, or infant asphyxiation were far more common in the 7th century than they are even today, and especially since lack of ventilation and the use of coal-powered stoves within the palace would have made a buildup of toxic gases very likely indeed.

If that was the case, the two women at the center lose much of their monstrous qualities that either of the other two stories convey. That of either Consort Wu or Wong is driven by either ambition or jealousy to infanticide. Instead, what it becomes is a tragic, but natural and unavoidable death of a child. Even if we accept this final explanation of the baby's daughter's death as accidental rather than intentional, though, Consort Wu nevertheless doesn't completely lose her calculating nature. In the words of Rahm Emanuel, or Winston Churchill, quote, never let a good crisis go to waste. And so, even if it was an accidental death rather than deranged murder, rather than simply mourn the loss, she attempted almost

immediately to capitalize on this situation. It was the perfect crime to frame the Empress for, and thus oust her. Emperor Gaozong seems to have accepted Wang's guilt and decided to act on it, though, strangely, never in a public fashion. This whole ordeal would remain behind palace gates, potentially a sign that he wasn't as sure of his empress's guilt as might otherwise be assumed. Gaozong decided that deposing Wang and demoting her was the best course of action, but he wished to have his chief advisors, especially those with ties to the empress's powerful clan, backing his decision.

Thus, he addressed his high council, led by the eminent chancellor Zhangsun Wuji, and it did not go how the emperor had hoped it might. Zhangsun and the majority of the council remained steadfastly against the demotion of Empress Wang. She and her family connections were just too powerful. But the deck turned ever against the sitting Empress, helped along, no doubt, by the machinations of Consort Wu. Either later the same year or the following one, the Empress's mother would find herself

banned from the palace following allegations that she, and perhaps the Empress as well, had been employing dark magics against the prime consort. In 655, the opposition of the High Council began to waver, when one of the chief opponents of Wang's demotion was himself demoted as punishment for an unrelated matter, and then banished to a minor fiefdom in far-flung Sichuan, removing his voice from the imperial council altogether. With the political deck now somewhat shuffled, Emperor Gaozong once more broached the subject of replacing the empress with his four chancellors. Zhang Sun and two of the other chancellors, Chu Suiliang and Lai Ji, once more made known their disapproval, this time with stony silence when the question was posed. But the fourth, an elderly former general under both Gao Zong's father and grandfather before, piped up, saying, quote,

This is a personal matter for His Majesty's own household to make. Why ask anyone else? End quote. That one little crack in the unity of his chancellors proved enough for gao zong and he became resolved he ordered that his will on the matter be made known to the court with a statement that read when an old farmer has harvested an extra ten bushels of wheat he wishes to change his wife how much more when an emperor wishes to establish a new empress why Why should he seek first permission of others and cause them to recklessly counsel against it? End quote. All right, Gao Zong, I'm not really getting the farmer bit, but I kind of see where you're going with this. In order to make perfectly clear how dissatisfied he was with those who had given their honest opinion in this situation and voiced against the consort Wu, he ordered that his chancellor, Chu Suiliang, be banished from the capital altogether. And I'm sure that in his

imperial tomb, Emperor Taizong, you know, the guy who had implored his son from his deathbed to listen to good advice even if you don't like it, was rolling over in his grave. Regardless, with the matter now decided, it now came to the optics of the dethronement. It wouldn't do to simply say, because I want to, to the wider public. And so formal charges were written up against both Empress Wang and the former prime consort, Xiao, alleging that they had been found plotting to poison the emperor.

The two were swiftly demoted to commoners and imprisoned, while their respective families were likewise punished by having all titles and ranks stripped from their members, and them collectively banished to the disease-ridden southern province of Lingnan. Thus, on the 19th day of the tenth month of 655, Wu, having by this point apparently reverted her name back to Wu Zhao rather than the diminutive Wu Mei, was formally enthroned at the side of Emperor Gaozong as Wu Huanghou, Empress Consort Wu. The first day of the next year would see her position solidified with the shuffling of Gaozong's imperial princes. Since the former Empress Wang had been childless, she had herself suggested that a son of one of the lesser consorts be named as the heir apparent as either a placeholder

prince or, she perhaps thought that a potential puppet to work through should she remain barren. But the new Empress Wu had no such difficulty. She had three sons, and so, as of the new year of 656, her eldest, Prince Li Hong, was named the crown prince of Tong. And to signify that a profound change of dynastic policy had just taken place, Gaozong adopted a new reign title, Xianqing, meaning Manifest Felicity. With that detail out of the way, Empress Wu turned and decided that it was payback time. All those liars and dirty, dirty cheats of the world who had stood in her way to the top were now little more than ants to be crushed.

And crush them them she would. Less than a month after taking the throne, she would turn her vengeance on the former Empress and former Prime Consort, Wang and Xiao. Theirs would be a truly horrific fate. Under Empress Wu's orders, they had been locked away inside a structure within the palace with its doors and windows tightly sealed, and thus left in total darkness with only a small slat for giving the pair of prisoners their meals. When the Emperor visited their makeshift cell, he grew saddened by both their conditions and their pitiable cries for leniency and mercy. In short order, he was moved to grant their requests for freedom, and promised to return and do so however when empress wu learned of his change of heart she flew into what can only be the beginning of their suffering.

Next, Wu ordered their hands and feet amputated, in some tellings their entire arms and legs, and then them lowered into large vats of wine, snarling, quote, Let the witches be drunk to the bone, end quote. When they were informed of the fate they were about to endure, Wang took the news with highborn dignity, bowing her head and stating may his imperial majesty live forever her once again as a mere concubine. Former consort Xiao, on the other hand, was somewhat less reserved in her reaction. She screamed out, Wu is a treacherous monster! May it be that I am reincarnated as a cat, and that she be reincarnated as a mouse, so that I can forever and ever grab at her throat. Their sentence was carried out, where they wallowed in agony for days before expiring.

Empress Wu then had their shattered bodies removed from the vats and beheaded. But even then she was not yet done with her hated rivals. Her ire then turned on their families, now bent not on extermination, but rather humiliation. The Wang clan was renamed the Mang clan, likening them to serpents, and Consort Xiao's clan was renamed to the homophone Xiao, meaning owl. The gist was clear. These are not great nobles, but wild beasts. Once again, however, we are forced to confront the uncertainty that comes with a story like Empress Wu's being so thoroughly editorialized and horrorized by prejudiced Confucian historians, aghast at even the idea of a great woman in power.

The tale of the wine vats comes from the Zizhi Tongjian, which itself accepted the same tale from the New Book of Tang. However, the Old Book of Tang paints the execution of the empress and the consort somewhat less vividly. In that book, they were simply strangled. The final act of vengeance we'll look at today would be against those within her husband's ministry who had tried to block her ascension. Poor Qu Suili Liang, the former chancellor who had already been demoted and then exiled, found himself further demoted and exiled twice more within a year at the empress's behest. Though he would time and again seek to remind the

emperor of his years of loyal service to him as well as his father before him, Gao Zong wouldn't even bother to read the desperate missives. Chu Sui-Liang would die in exile, south of Hanoi, Vietnam, banished to an area so remote it wasn't even properly in the Tang Empire at all. Similar fates would befall the others of the emperor's chancellery who had opposed her rise. Chancellors Lai Ji and Yuan Han

were implicated in Chu's alleged plot and likewise banished to distant lands. The only one who was able to withstand this flurry of revenge by the Empress was the most elder and trusted of Gaozong's inner staff, Zhang Sunwu Ji, the Titan of the Tang, who had been a key player in Taizong's seizure of the throne and then Gaozong's eventual selection as the heir. But even his time draws short under Empress Wu's vindictive gaze. Today, Empress Wu stands triumphantly atop a pile of vanquished and dismembered bodies of those who had dared to stand in her way. And the body count is only going to grow from here, because there are still those who would resist her will to dominate the whole of the empire.

But victorious though the Empress of China may be, it did not come without a personal toll. And so, we will leave off today with a bit of a ghost story. You'll remember from a couple of minutes ago that before her hideous torture and execution, Consort Xiao had laid a curse on Empress Wu. May I be reborn as a cat and you as a mouse? Well, Wu was a highly superstitious woman, and took such matters to heart. So she did the only reasonable thing,

and ordered that all cats be banished from the Imperial Palace. Nevertheless, the feline purge did little to settle her nerves, and her dreams were frequently disturbed by haunting, cloying visions of the drowned and dismembered empress and consort, with scattered hair and bleeding limbs, seeking her out and trying to kill her in turn. When the dreams became too much to bear, she became convinced that the palace had become haunted by their vengeful ghosts and sought to get away. She would take up residence for a time in another palace in Chang'an, seeking to escape the specters, but would come to find that the whispers of guilt and regret from beyond the grave are carried with you wherever one may choose to flee.

Her move to the Penglai Palace would help her disturbing dreams and visions little, if at all. And in time, Empress Wu would seek an even more drastic solution to her ghost problem. But here we stand today. Wu Zhao has gone from learned daughter of a minor noble, and by hook or by crook, not only become a royal concubine, but played the palatial game of intrigue to perfection against those with far more experience. As a result, rather than being relegated to a monastery following Taizong's death, or even being grateful for her near-miraculous re-entrance into palace life from what should have been a life of cloistered prayers, she has

parlayed her natural gifts and almost superhuman guile into a position at the very top, the Empress of China sitting beside, and increasingly above, her weak-willed, indecisive husband. Next time, we will continue that roaring rampage of girl power, as Empress Wu continues to assert her domination over the Tang imperial court, helped along by Gaozong's ever more frequent and debilitating bouts of illness. All of this to culminate in something China had never seen before or since, a woman sitting on the imperial throne as ruler in her own right over all of China. Thank you for listening.

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