The History of China - #93 - Tang 11: Dynasty of One

Episode Date: March 21, 2016

Wu Zhao sits on the Throne of Heaven as divine sovereign in her own right. But challenges from expansionistic neighbors such as the Tibetans, the Turks, and the Khitan will throw her regime’s stability into question, an ongoing economic crisis will spiral out of control, and her scandalous affair with two pretty-boy half-brothers will throw the entire imperial court into turmoil, potentially spelling an end to her singular era of rule. Time Period Covered: 690-705 CE Major Historical Figures: Tang/Zhou Dynasty: Wu Zhao [The Holy Empress Regnant Zetian] (r. 690-705) Prince Li Xian [former Emperor Zhongzong] (re-confirmed as heir in 698) Prince Li Dan [former Emperor Ruizong] Princess Taiping Minister Wei Yuancheng Xue Huaiyi, head of White Horse Temple (d. 695) High Inquisitor Lai Junchen (d. 698) Zhang Yizhi (d. 705) Zhang Changzong (d. 705) Turkic Khannate: Qapaghan Khan [Mouchou] (d. 716) Tibetan Empire: Tridu Tsongsan Tsampo [King of Tibet] the mGar Clan (d. 698) Khitan Tribe: Chieftain Li Qincheng (d. 697) Chieftain Sun Wanzheng (d. 697) Major Works Cited: Clements, Johnathan. Wu: the Chinese Empress Who Schemed, Seduced and Murdered Her Way to Become A Living God. Dash, Mike. “The Demonization of Empress Wu” in The Smithsonian found at: http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/the-demonization-of-empress-wu-20743091/?no-ist Fitzgerald, C.P. The Empress Wu. Guisso, Richard W. L. “The Reigns of the empress Wu, Chung-tsung and Jui-tsung (684-712)” in The Cambridge History of China, vol. 3. Guisso, Richard W.L. Wu Tse-T’ien and the Politics of Legitimation in T’ang China. Liu, Xiu. Jiu Tangshu. Sima, Guang. Zizhi Tongjian. Woo, X.L. Empress Wu the Great. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

You're listening to an Airwave Media Podcast. History isn't black and white, yet too often it's presented as such. Grey History, The French Revolution is a long-form history podcast dedicated to exploring the ambiguities and nuances of the past. From a revolution of hope and liberty to the infamous Reign of terror. You can't understand the modern world without understanding the French Revolution. So search for the French Revolution today. Hello, and welcome to the History of China. Episode 93, Dynasty of One

When last we left China, the impossible had been made reality. A woman sat on the throne of heaven, wore the yellow robes of the emperor, and personally ruled the whole of the empire as divine sovereign. And that woman was Wu Zetian. Not only had she come into unprecedented total power, but had gone so far as to replace the ruling dynastic line and name with her own. The Tang was gone. Now was the era of the Zhou. And through it all, a deadly and delicate balancing act between her sons of the Li clan and her relatives of the Wu clan, over who would win her favor and either remain or replace the imperial clan altogether.

This new Zhou dynasty, while generally regarded as not being a huge break from the Tang, was in the process of seeing a near-total reorganization in its own expanding bureaucracy. And not just reorganization, but a fundamental shift in the way the imperial bureaucracy interacted with and its relationship to the sovereign that would have profound effects on the stability of the Chinese empire long into the future. Empress Wu, as should be more than apparent by now, wanted control, personal and absolute, at every level of her government. And those who were not game to play by her rules quickly found themselves minus a job if they were lucky, and minus a head

if they were less so. Professor Guesso notes that of the high officials employed during the Empress's period of reign, more than 80% would be removed from their post involuntarily, typically facing demotion, exile, or even death. This is a staggering statistic, especially if we compare it to the reign of her father-in-law, Taizong, a forceful power in his own right, but whose dismissal rate was a mere 33 percent. The precariousness of seeking high office under Empress Wu was even expressed in poetry at the time, probably most notably by the

contemporary historian Liu Zheji in his Fu poem, ominously titled Xu Chen, translating as Think It Over, or perhaps Think Twice. The Empress's early few years as sovereign was greatly helped along by the fact that, on the whole, things were relatively quiet in foreign relations. In what can really be called a huge stroke of good luck, almost all of China's neighbors—the Tibetans to the west, the Turks to the north, the Man tribes to the south—had all been stricken with their own civil wars, ensuring that none of their energies could be spent against Wu's Chinese empire. This had resulted in reportedly more than 350,000 non-Chinese refugees from the neighboring regions

seeking asylum within the empire between 690 and 694. In fact, in 692, the Empress would be convinced that the time had come to drive the fractured Tibetan forces out of the region of the four garrisons of the far west, thereby reclaiming the area, and thus the Silk Road, for the first time since it had fallen out of Chinese rule in 678. That would change in relatively short order, but for the moment at least, it would allow her administration to turn and attempt to deal with some of the more pressing and resilient problems facing the empire from within. But as it would turn out, many of these internal issues, most namely the economic chaos that still embroiled the dynasty's tax

collection rates, would prove to be far more intractable than the Empress had the patience to really dig into or try to solve. Once again, the answer would be short-term expedience, tax forgiveness to bring people back onto the books, for instance, rather than anything approaching lasting solutions to the baseline problems. In fact, the Empress didn't seem terribly concerned with much of these nuts and bolts problems at all. Guesso writes, quote, at court, though, the Empress showed little awareness of serious administrative problems and busied herself with literary compilation, the creation of new posts to fill and overfill, and her Buddhism, end quote. This last preoccupation with Buddhism was no stark

shift for the Empress, but it does seem to have been pushed further and further by her lover, the monk Huayi. Nevertheless, the relationship between the monk and the Empress had grown colder and more distant with time. There has been widespread speculation that the Empress had begun to expand her little harem of male lovers, including her personal physician, and that being relegated to only one of several rather than the apple of Zetian's eye, purportedly had a truly maddening effect on the monk. It remains unclear as to exactly how or why the events that were to transpire in 695 came about. Indeed, Huaiyi may have had nothing to do with it. There would certainly never be any definitive proof linking him to the act,

but when the Mingtong Palace caught fire and burned to the ground, the Empress thought that she knew who had set the blaze, her jilted, quite possibly mentally unstable lover. From X.L. Wu's Empress Wu the Great, quote, On the sixteenth night of the initial moon in 695, the heavenly hall caught fire, and the fire spread to the Ming hall. By daybreak, both halls were reduced to ashes. Holy Empress Wu did not need any of the background details leaking out,

so she declared that the fire had been caused by negligence on the part of some workers. As a matter of course, she could not punish Xie. On the contrary, she assigned him the task of reconstructing the Ming Hall. But on the fourth day of the second moon, the monk Huayi was killed. It was her daughter and protege, the Taiping princess, the very woman who had first introduced Huayi to her mother in the first place, who would offer the method to get rid of him now. He would be lured by one of the Empress's nephews to the garden enclave

of Princess Taiping, under what pretense exactly remains unknown, but we might guess that it was to have a liaison with the princess. Once inside the walled, secluded garden, however, rather than a hookup with the imperial princess, the monk found himself instead surrounded by a group of men who in short order seized and killed Huayi. His corpse was then sent back to the White Horse Temple and prepared and cremated in accordance with typical ceremonies for a deceased monk. Nevertheless, with the monk's death, so too ended the more overt and zealous of the Empress's Buddhist leanings. She would shortly after that drop the title of the Bodhisattva Maitreya, which you'll remember had been discovered by the Ong Kwayi some years before.

The edict stipulating vegetarian diets and the ban on animal slaughter was also lifted in this post-Kwayi world, and once again the Empress would begin to reimplement Confucian-style naming conventions for her era titles and the like. Even without its chief architect, the rebuilding of the Daming Palace complex proceeded with a spirit that Guizhou puts it as anything but Confucian. In spite of the economic difficulties facing the empire, the traditional histories tell of money being lavished on the project and poured out like sand. Certainly, it would have been a highly expensive endeavor, but again, the naked hostility of portrayals by the likes of Sima Guang and others paint the sheer scale of the endeavor in a

questionable light. Was it really so ruinously expensive as the Zizitongjian or the Book of Tong would have us believe? Or is it merely drawing a parallel between the despised empress and the last ruinously expensive emperor of the Sui? It's impossible to be sure. However, it's worth noting that in spite of the accounts by historian Sima and his ilk, what is not in question is that Yang of Sui bankrupted and ruined his dynasty, while Empress Wu, whatever one thinks of her personally, left her family and country far stronger than she found it. So expensive, surely. Ruinously so? Well, evidently not. Still, it wasn't exactly the best time to be committing to massive state expenditures.

Widespread counterfeiting of currency, as well as a general shortage of coinable metal ore had led, for instance, to the government requisitioning mass numbers of farm tools to be melted down so that a new obelisk could be constructed in Luoyang. Later in the Empress's reign, more dramatic steps were implemented to stave off economic crisis, including a period of some three years between 701 and 704 when the government actually authorized the use of some of the counterfeit currencies floating around to serve as legal tender in order to try to make up for the acute shortage of real coins. Then, in 703, things got really crazy when someone had the nutball idea to, get this, place a tax on merchants and trade. Ha! Though that would to many of us be a, well, duh, solution, it would prove to be a bridge too far for the traditionalist Confucian elements in the court, who were adamant that economic Christ or no,

lowering themselves to taxing trade and the lowly merchant class was something they would never accept. Ultimately, the proposal was dropped, and the crisis continued. So what was the imperial government spending so much on that it was feeling this economic crunch? Well, there was the palace, sure, but that's just a palace. In fact, there were far, far larger expenditures than a construction project that the Zhou government faced.

One of them, the Empress's ever-expanding Byzantine labyrinth of bureaucracy, all of which needed to be paid. And secondly, the expense item that would really balloon beginning in 695, which was the defense budget. The Turks, you see, were back, and in a big way. Sure, first the Eastern Turks and then the Western Turks had been dispatched by Taizong and Gaozong, respectively, but that's the funny thing about those steppe nomads. You take your eye off them for just a couple of decades and they go reorganizing themselves into a new raiding horde.

It'll get you every time. This time, the Turks had reconglomerated into the so-called Northern iteration of their Khanate, led by a Khan the Chinese called Mo Chou, but was known in Turkic as Kapagan. Well, alright, the Turks were raiding once again, and Kapagan Khan would prove easy enough to buy off, at least in the short term, by bestowing him a ducal title and a promise to think about giving him a princess bride. That would buy the Chinese time. At least time enough to pivot and deal with, what's this now? It's the Tibetans again. Ugh. The Tibetan Empire had, in spite of its meteoric rise and expansion, been wracked for years by an interdynastic struggle between the ruling family of the Tsangpo, or king, who was at this point an infant, and a powerful clan called the Mgar, who had seized control of key ministerial positions. Man, this sounds so familiar, right? So while the royal family and the Gar clan hashed out who

would actually control Tibet, they had laid off China for the most part. But at last, in 695, the most powerful of the Gar ministers asserted his power and led a huge army into China proper. Obviously, this had to be dealt with. And so, the following spring, two of Empress Wu's top generals were dispatched at the head of an imperial army to put an end to this Tibetan incursion, which had worryingly made it as close as 200 miles from the capital itself. The Chinese and Tibetan forces clashed near Mount Sulohan in Gansu, and much to the surprise and chagrin of Empress Wu, the Tibetan army absolutely wiped the floor with her Chinese forces. Both commanding generals were subsequently stripped of their ranks and demoted, one all the way down to Commodore, for this colossal failure. Well, that was certainly going to be a setback, but hey, no big deal.

After all, it could be worse, right? Well, that's when it, you guessed it, got worse. From the northeast rose the Catan tribes, in a rebellion that threw the already beleaguered Zhou administration completely for a loop. The Khitan, you see, had been incorporated as a Tang vassal all the way back in 648 by Taizong as a part of the Songmo Protectorate, and they'd lived as such without so much as a peep of defiance for almost half a century. But only now, now of all times, they're going to rise and revolt? Well, in spite of their high level of

autonomy within the protectorate's administration, it had been the behavior of its latest overseer that had triggered this backlash. He was reported by the two chieftains of the Qitan, Li Qincheng and Sun Wanzheng, as having treated their kinsmen like slaves, and during a recent famine in the region, having refused to send any relief supplies whatsoever. Their backs against a wall, starving, and with no help from the central authorities forthcoming, what else could they do? They raised the flag of rebellion, and within weeks had attracted a band of like-minded tribesmen numbering in the tens of thousands. Even fresh on the heels of their embarrassing defeat against the Tibetans,

the Zhou Imperial Army was nevertheless quick to respond to this emergent threat to their stability. The Zizhi Tongjin tells of the force led by 28 generals marching north to meet the Khitan rebels and put them down, and they would find their foe on the battlefield at a site near modern Beijing. Now, if 28 generals sounds like an awful lot, that's because it is. And so what happened next might very well have been a case of too many chefs spoiling the pot. But regardless, in doing battle with this ragtag rebel force, the best that the Imperial Army could put together would face its second shocking and total defeat in the course of a single year.

Reportedly, the Zhou force wasn't just defeated, but virtually annihilated to a man by the Khitan army. In a single day, the entire Zhou dynasty's claims of stability and peace had been fundamentally shaken. Faced with what may well have proved to be an existential threat to her order, Empress Wu pulled out all the stops. Desperate times, after all, call for desperate measures. Guesso writes, quote, The next month, an edict made the offer of amnesty and heavy rewards to convicts and private slaves who would enroll in the army, an offer so extraordinary that one of her officials gasped at this as damaging to the fundamental structure of the state, end quote. To arm slaves

and convicts and send them against the Khitan was virtually unthinkable, and yet that was exactly what was about to happen. But the hits just kept on coming for the Zhou Empire. The same month as the unprecedented edict to raise badly needed additional forces, well, here came the Turks. Their raiding armies penetrated as deep as Liangzhou in Gansu, throwing the empire into further disorder and prompting the Tibetans, whose forward progress had stalled out but nevertheless remained hugely threatening,

to send word to the Empress in her court, demanding the total withdrawal from and secession of the Chinese in the western garrisons of Shiyu. It was a complete nightmare in the making. Or at least it would have been, if the situation had been presented to someone less capable than Empress Wu. This wasn't ideal, but she could work with it. She had been informed, for one, that though they were militarily powerful, that the Gar clan held onto their power within Tibet only tenuously,

and were widely hated by their own populace. So she sent an envoy to talk peace terms with them, and with overt instructions to negotiate over the idea of a marriage alliance and some territorial exchange. But the envoy's true objective would be something far more Wu's style, which was fomenting dissension within the ranks from within. It would take some time to percolate, but in offering the guardsars a marriage alliance,

Wu was in fact sending them a time bomb. An image of Chinese favor of their clan over the Tibetan royalty would in time virtually ensure the former's downfall by their own hubris, but we'll get back to that in due time. The Turks would require something of a different tact, since Kappagan Khan was far more secure in his position than the Gar ministers. He, too, wanted a marriage alliance, to Wu's daughter, Princess Taiping, and had stated that should the Empress agree to these terms,

not only would he cease his raids across northern China, but would go so far as to commit his forces to putting down the Khitan rebellion on Wu's behalf. An intriguing offer indeed, and one that she promised to consider. In the meantime, though, she deftly confirmed Kappagan as the Khagan of the Turks, as well as naming him an imperial general. Kappagan took these marks of distinction as a sign of the Empress's favor, and his impending adoption into the imperial clan proper. And thus he duly turned his army right around, and commenced aly turned his army right around and

commenced a full-on attack against the unruly Catan bases. The Turkic cavalry would raid the Catan villages and capture many of the rebels' families and supplies. This turn of events, however, would not have the intended outcome of quelling the rebellion. Now, with their supply caches and families taken captive and under threat from the northwest, the hostility of the Turks actually had the opposite effect, into driving the Khitan raiding bands to plunge yet deeper south into Chinese territory, all the way to the borders of Ying province in modern Hebei. Before moving onward out of 696, I'd be remiss if I didn't bring up the fact that Empress Wu had commissioned the reforging of one of the great lost treasures of Chinese history, the Jiu Ding, or the Nine Holy Copper Tripod Cauldrons,

that the kings and emperors of the prehistoric Xia and Shang had used in their holiest ceremonies to the heavens, before they had been lost in the Si River near the end of the Warring States period more than a thousand years prior. Now, some 870 tons of copper later, she had completed the task and remade what had served as a marker for heavenly favor for millennia, and in 696 was even seriously considering having them gilded as well, though the economic crisis that yet swirled across the empire was the likely reason that she never did get around to that particular embellishment. The year 697 would prove to be an even stranger, or as Guizhou puts it, gloomier, year for the Zhou and its empress. Kapagan Khan, his marriage to Princess Taiping still not

forthcoming, once again grew impatient with Empress Wu's apparent foot dragging, and so began raiding along the Chinese borders once again. It was also around the new year that yet another plot against the Empress's life was uncovered, this time by a well-connected prefect with delusions of grandeur. Word, of course, leaked, and the Empress, already dealing with the triple headaches of the Tibetans, the Turks, and the Khitan, was not feeling in a forgiving mood at all. She sent her fearsome High Inquisitor, Lai Junchun, onto the case, and he delved into his sadistic work with his usual verve. Hueso writes, quote, Lai had been awaiting just such a chance, and expanding the affair all

out of proportion involved the innocent with the guilty. The victims totaled 36 men, all eminent officials of the empire. Their families were executed, and more than a thousand persons, convicted of complicity, were exiled. The atmosphere at court was once again of suspicion and dread." And it's here that we introduce two of the most infamous brothers in Chinese history to our story, Zhang Yizhi and Zhang Changzong. They were by all accounts beautiful men, one might even say foppish, and were described by the old Book of Tang as painted and powdered, their robes of rich brocade. They arrived at court and found a meteoric rise in their imperial favor and power, allegedly as a result of sexual liaisons with First Princess Taiping, and possibly

later the Empress herself. Although it does remain conjectural, since they may have been gay, or eunuchs, or both. It's really hard to tell. Empress Wu, though approaching 70 years old by this time, was said to be so skilled in the art of cosmetics that she was able to, quote, conceal her age and even her closest attendants could not tell, end quote. As you may recall, the Empress had long been an imbiber of aphrodisiacs, ever since she'd been introduced to them by her late former lover, Hua Yi, the use of which supposedly even allowed her to grow back a number of her teeth and her eyebrows, lending yet more credence to her illusions of youth, and thus the scandal over her alleged behaviour. Drinking a potion and growing back your teeth doesn't sound all

that realistic to me, so I would say take that legend with a grain of salt. 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. This all does seem rather fantastical, of course, but it is clear that rumours of the Empress's supposed infidelities and carnal pleasures with her harem of young men swirled openly through the court and across the capital, though, as ever, solid details are few and far between. We're left with little but rumor,

scandal, and less than reputable accounts of spiteful contemporaries. Regardless of the specific nature of their relationship with the Empress, though, the Zhang brothers rapidly proceeded to gather posts, honors, promotions, and influence at a startling rate. And soon even Empress Wu's own clansmen were said to be content in holding the Zhang brothers' horse bridles. Assessment of this courtside drama will have to take a back seat for now, though, to the stark external realities that hadn't, you know, gone away or anything just by being ignored. You remember them, right? The Turks, the Tibetans, and oh yeah, the Khitan, that were all breathing down China's neck all at once.

Khabargan Khan, by now quite annoyed that the fact that his demands for a royal marriage still hadn't been met with anything other than vague maybes and equivocations, once again sent his demands to the Empress. Several of her advisors urged her to take a hardline approach to this presumptuous barbarian warlord, but Empress Wu did ultimately realize that at this point she was not really in any position to risk escalating it with the Turks, especially when they could be turned into an ally against the Khitan rebel army that was still rampaging through Hebei.

With great reluctance, she sent a reply to the Turkish Khan, in the form of a firm agreement to a royal marriage between her family and his, as well as a massive bribe just to get him to shut it for a while. It would be this peace between Chinese and Turk, however temporary it might prove to be, that would prove decisive against the Khitan rebels as the spring of 697 gave way to summer. Word reached the rebels that they were caught in a vice. Hostilities had once again opened up between the Turks and the Khitan rebels as the spring of 697 gave way to summer. Word reached the rebels that they were caught in a vice. Hostilities had once again opened up between the Turks and the Khitan, which had resulted

in the rebels losing their main base and its supply cache to the horsemen's raiders, again. Then word arrived that the Empress Wu had managed to amass an army of some 200,000, primarily composed of those convicts and former slaves that had been promised redemption if they joined up, which was, as they spoke, marching north to crush the rebel force. News of having lost their primary base just happened to reach the frontline troops at the particularly poor moment of them having just engaged the Chinese army in battle, and the rebel coalition, already running on fumes and pent-up anger, reached its breaking point. Those members of the rebel force who were not ethnically Khitan mutinied as battle began,

and that was pretty much all she wrote. The demoralized rebel army broke, was routed, and subsequently slaughtered. Those few who managed to evade capture or summary execution would be forced to flee as far as Tibet before they found refuge. Guaisho puts it, at enormous cost in men and money, and in the devastation of much of Hebei, would be forced to flee as far as Tibet before they found refuge. Guizhou puts it, quote, At enormous cost in men and money, and in the devastation of much of Hebei, the Khitan rebellion was finally quelled. End quote. Such a turning of the tide would mark the Empress once again easing off her policy of terror to maintain control over her officialdom. And this time, she ended up really meaning it.

In spite of everything he'd done being by the Empress's own command, High Inquisitor Lai Junchen would be among the first to be placed on the Imperial chopping block as proof that Empress Wu had reformed her policies and seen the error of her ways. Really though, Inquisitor Lai had made his own bed. Drunk with a power that was seemingly limitless in scope, he made the mistake of turning his sights against the high-ranking members of both imperial clans, the Liu's and the Wu's, and finally, fatally, on Princess Taiping herself.

We will get more into Princess Taiping next episode, but for now, suffice it to say that she is every bit her mother's daughter, and more than capable of turning a plot back in on itself. When the suit against her, of some treachery, was brought to the attention of the court, the princess essentially countersued the High Inquisitor, accusing him of treachery against the imperial houses, and put forth an argument, quote, so well managed that the empress was forced finally to agree to Lai's execution, end quote. Imagine that. He sues the princess, and she presents a defense so compelling that the court executes the prosecution instead. He was beheaded in the city square, and then the gathered crowd seized his corpse and tore it limb from limb in celebration of the long-hated and

long-feared inquisitor had at last tasted true justice. As the capital celebrated Lai's death, report after report after report poured into the Empress, detailing the extent of the late Inquisitor's sadistic terror methods against guilty and innocent alike. Empress Wu, maybe genuinely or maybe just prudently, then issued a public declaration admitting that she had been fooled by her officials within the censorate and pledged to end the policies of terror at once, and this time she would follow through on that pledge. For the first time in almost a decade, the ever-delicate question of inheritance and succession was able to be broached ever so gently by officials who even the year before would have been too frozen in terror to even attempt it. But it was a moment of unusual openness on the Empress's part.

I mean, she couldn't very well simply threaten them with execution or demotion after just having said that the days of terror were over now, could she? And so, at last, the order of succession would be resolved once and for all, and it would not be to the long-waiting Wu clan's liking. In the third month of 698, Empress Wu's eldest surviving son, the former emperor Zhang Zong, and his wife, Empress Wei, were summoned out of their place of exile back to Luoyang. The future of the empire would once again be entrusted to the care of the Li clan. Still, though her son was back in the capital, and there would only have been one

reason to have done that, for the moment she kept this knowledge close to her chest, to be publicly announced only when the time was right. And if the Wu clan was dissatisfied enough by being locked out of the imperial inheritance by their own daughter, they were going to be forced to eat another big ol' slice of humble pie in short order. Remember the promise of the marriage alliance between the Empress's imperial family and that of the Turkish Khan, Kabagan? Pretty much everyone had assumed that it would be one of the Chinese princesses wed to one of the Khan's sons or the Khan himself. After all, that's just the way these marriage alliance things work. That's the way they've always worked.

But Empress Wu had never been big on the way things are always done. Now was she? So instead, she sent her grandnephew, the son of the Wu clan nephew who'd been eyeing the throne for years now, to marry one of Kapagan Khan's daughters. Ah yes, the old Zetian Switaru. Hold my dynasty, I'm going in. You might well imagine the sense of utter shock and horror that such a change might engender. Sending a princess out to the middle of the desert to marry a bunch of barbarians, perfectly fine. But sending a prince for the same purpose? Unthinkable.

Maybe this sense of revulsion at the very idea is summed up best in the Zizhetongjian, when the official Zhang Jianzhi exclaimed to the court, quote, You might imagine the consequence of speaking imperial prince being married off to a barbarian woman, end quote. You might imagine the consequence of speaking against the Empress's decision so openly, and you'd be right. Minister Zhang would soon find him and his big fat complaining mouth shipped off to the frontiers to cool his jets for a while. But it certainly wasn't only the imperial court at Luoyang that was surprised and enraged at this turn of events.

The Turkic Khan had been very clear what his expectations were when he demanded a marriage into the royal family, and this ain't it. Realizing that all of the Empress's vague promises were little more than hot air, that she had little if any real intention of ever truly following through on, Kabagan said, well, screw this diplomacy nonsense then, and once again prepared to take what he wanted from China by force if it would not be freely given. In the autumn of 698, under the paper-thin pretext of restoring the Li clan to the throne, the Turkish hordes descended into China from the north and straight into the already war-ravaged Hebei region. Empress Wu's military officials sprang into action on the defense against this threat, mustering a force that by some counts was as many as 450,000 soldiers, though again, take such figures with a grain of salt always.

Yet even this massive army would prove unable to effectively pin the highly mobile horse archers and spearmen down. The imperial court at this juncture responded to this impasse with the classic military answer to everything, more. But the people of the Zhou dynasty, it seemed, were for once just tapped out. Guizhou writes, quote, this time the people balked. Successive levies yielded only a total of 1,000 men, and the empress was at last forced to play her trump card. That trump card? The official announcement of her heir. The Khan of the Turks' stated aim was to restore power to the Li clan? Well, so be it. With fanfare that marked virtually every one of the Empress Wu's public displays, she announced an edict proclaiming publicly Zhongzong's restoration

to the heir of the empire, and immediately installed him as the commander-in-chief of the Hebei Regional Armies. The restoration of the scion of the Li clan had the intended effect on both fronts. It simultaneously completely took the wind out of Capangan's sails by ostensibly fulfilling his war demands, while rallying the citizens of the empire under that flag once again. Purportedly, as many as 50,000 new volunteers joined the imperial army immediately following the edict's promulgation, and by the end of the year, a whole new army of 100,000 was led into the field to join the existing Hebei forces in pinning down the Turkic invaders. Kapagan Khan, recognizing that the jig was up, retired from Hebei and withdrew from Chinese territories. Instead, he'd take his army of as many as 400,000 steppe riders and infantry and turn it against Central Asia.

Sima Guang sums up his conquests of the steppe as, quote, the barbarians of the northwest all joined him, and great was the contempt they showed for the Middle Kingdom, end quote. Within a decade, he and his men would control virtually the whole of Inner Asia, from the edge of the Pacific in Manchuria, stretching all the way westward as far as the Ili River Valley in Kazakhstan. But how was Kabagan able to avoid a Chinese counter-strike and reclaim so much of the old Gukturk Khanate? Well, as I'd said, the Chinese populace was pretty much tapped out, and it had taken the near-miraculous return of Zhongzong to inspire even enough confidence and loyalty to the regime to drive the Khan off in the first place. So there was absolutely zero

interest, or imperial funds for that matter, to press the issue on a vast, ruinously costly expedition into the West. With so many pressing problems at home, an interventionist foreign policy had been effectively swept off the table for the foreseeable future. And so, Capagon was able to recoup, rearm, and China aside, bring much of the rest of East and Central Asia to heel. There would be one further instance of Capagon threatening Chinese territories in 702, but for the most part he'd find himself too embroiled in suppressing revolts within his own newly conquered territories to pose much of a threat to the Middle Kingdom, until his death in 716. In the meantime, in order to stave off further potential foreign incursions, and at a far more budgetable price than staffing true

imperial troopers on the border, Empress Wu had had her ear bent about a border defense innovation, a strategy called yi yi zhi yi, using the barbarians to control the barbarians. Why not use the barbarians themselves to guard our borders? Well, it wasn't exactly an innovation. Instead, it was more of a callback to a defense strategy stretching back as far as the early Han Dynasty, back when China first begun significantly grading against the Steplans and the peoples outside of the Yellow

River Valley. Wu's employment of the strategy of simply buying off border peoples to fend off those beyond would prove largely successful for the remainder of her reign and well beyond. In the centuries to come, the imperial court will come to rely more and more on non-Chinese soldiers for use as the empire's outer bulwarks. But that strategy, though cost-conscious and effective for now, will ultimately prove to have an Achilles' heel all its own. But let's not get ahead of ourselves. After all, we still have one more foreign empire to deal with, the Tibetans. The rising tide of the Tibetan Empire had been unexpected and rapid, but so too would be its ebb. In 699, the political time bomb Empress Wu had fed the Tibetan aristocracy finally detonated. The young king of Tibet, Zhizhu Congshan, had come of age and been none

too pleased with the Gar clan's apparent usurpation of imperial powers as well as the royal prerogative of receiving Chinese imperial weddings, and he moved against the Guars in spectacularly bloody fashion. In late 698, he would invite all of the members of his powerful vassal clan on a royal hunting expedition. The whole of the Gar clan, reportedly some 2,000 men, joined the imperial retinue in the grand hunt, but soon found that the game to be slaughtered was them. The guard generals in the field, in desperation, engaged the Zhou imperial general Tang Shoujing, who defeated the demoralized Tibetan forces handily in six lopsided battles. The survivors soon surrendered to the Chinese outright, rather than risk retreating into the

arms of their executioners. With the crumbling away of this last external threat, China was, at least for now, secure from outside. But what had become very clear indeed was that the stability within the imperial court itself was coming to a boiling point. The Zhang brothers, you remember them, right? Those beautiful young things the empress just couldn't say no to, had come to dominate court proceedings, and by 702 were overtly threatening to bring the bureaucracy itself to its knees. In 699, the Empress had granted the pair official posts within the court, with a newly formed body called the Gung-ho-fu, or the Stork Institute, which was yet another of the Empress's fanciful neologisms,

harkening back to the mythical and in this instance Taoist past. On paper, at least, it had been pitched as a kind of follow-up to the Empress's Northgate scholars, but in less than half a decade, whatever its initial intent, the Stork Institute had descended into something apparently closely resembling a male fleshpot for the Empress's personal use. Gui Zhou writes, If a memorial from Chu Jingzi is to be believed, by the mid-700s it had become a scandal of carousing, gambling, drinking, unnatural vice, and fantastic pantomimes, a rich mine of source material for the more imaginative novelists of the later centuries. To the Zhang brothers,

she would deny nothing, even as official complaints began to pour into the imperial city from across the capital and empire. The Zhangs flouted their lifestyles openly. They were selling imperial posts to the highest bidders. They were openly intervening in governmental affairs to which they held no claim. Nothing, it seemed, was beyond their means, and nothing would force the Empress to action against her two favorites. It would ultimately come down to what it had with Lai Junchen as well, which was stepping over the line from targeting political opponents to targeting members of the Imperial Li and Wu clans. The brothers Zhang would wind up denouncing the two eldest children of the crown prince Zhongzong,

his eldest daughter and his only son, after the pair had criticized the brothers. It was a denunciation that cost the two their lives, costing Zhongzong his one and only natural heir, and forever earning the hatred of the Li clan. This may have been a solution to some short-term problem for the Zhang brothers, but it proved tremendously short-sighted. And it, quote, cost the Zhangs their only chance to survive their protectress. Alliance with one of the paramount families could perhaps have saved them. Instead, they foolishly isolated themselves. End quote.

Perhaps it was out of some sense of mourning for her son's recent tragedy, the loss of her grandson, or perhaps it was because at 88 years old, her health was beginning to rapidly decline. Or maybe, as Professor Guizhou posits, it was a symbolic move, showing that, quote, the empire would return soon to the Tang. Whatever the reason, Empress Wu would return to Chang'an for the first time in almost a decade in the winter of 701, and remain in the old capital for the following two years,

in spite of her famous disdain for the city. It seems that she wanted to, before the inevitable occurred, wrap up what loose ends she could with the time she had left. To that end, she issued a series of royal proclamations granting amnesty to those still involved in rebellions against the throne, and even restoring many political rights to members of the royal household she'd stripped away from them previously and granted pardon to the families with the convicted criminal. But it would also be during this time in Chang'an that she would seal her own downfall. In mid-703, the Zhang brothers took advantage of one of the empress's ever more frequent bouts of illness by moving against an elder statesman and a man who had proven to be something of a nemesis for the brothers,

named Wei Yucheng. The brothers falsely charged Minister Wei with advocating that the Empress abdicate the throne, a charge so serious that it would result in possibly the most famous trial of the Tang period. The full power of the imperial court went into defending their fellow minister Wei, innocent of the Zhang's baseless allegations. And when even the prosecution's star witness, Wei's own subordinate, Zhang Shuo, backed out and refused to perjure himself on the stand by denouncing Wei, but instead charged the Zhang brothers with forcing him to speak against his master, well, there could be no doubt that Wei would be proved innocent of the charges.

But then, the Empress, presiding over it all, instead banished both Wei and the non-accomplished official to the south anyway. The historians tend to agree that there could have been no reason for such a miscarriage of justice except for allowing the Zhangs to save face in front of the court. Guizhou writes, This act, so uncharacteristic of her, probably determined her fate. High officials now saw the extent of the Zhang power and realized the need to destroy them lest their own fate be sealed by a real, or forged, deathbed edict. Some went further. If the unworthy favorites who monopolized the Empress's love could not be brought down, the Empress herself must fall. End quote. In the tenth month of 703, the imperial court would return to Luoyang for what would prove the final time.

The Zhang brothers had begun to increasingly isolate the empress from all others, even directly and rudely barring her other ministers from meeting with her. The accusations, charges, and even formal suits continued to pour in against the corrupt affairs that they were caught up in, and yet time and again they skated away with no or only the lightest of punishments, and never once losing the Empress's favor. In 704, when charges of high treason were brought against Zhang Changzong, the Empress even set up a tribunal specifically chosen by her to acquit him. But even they, bought and paid for it to give legal cover to the predetermined outcome, could not ignore the mountain of evidence damning Changzong, and found him guilty.

With her pet now facing immediate execution, Bu would be forced to issue a truly extraordinary royal pardon for the now-convicted traitor. In doing so, she saved Changzong's life for the moment, but put the final nail in the coffin of her reign. In the first month of the year 705, a group of half a dozen or so nobles led the strike against the imperial palace. They had managed to gain the reluctant support of the imperial heir, Zhongzhong, by coaxing him out of his residence in the middle of the night, after having assured him that he had the backing of both his sister,

Princess Taiping, and his brother, the former Emperor Ruizong. Then, backed by 500 Yulin palace guardsmen, the force entered the imperial city through the infamous Xuanwu Gate. The force quickly found the Zhang brothers, either already in the courtyard or alternately just dragged out there. The brothers were surrounded by the palace guard and summarily beheaded. The conspirators then turned to the inner gates of the palace, making to enter and do what needed to be done. But instead, they found barring their way to the inner gate, a disheveled but wrathful

as all hell Empress Wu. She had seen what was going on and understood what it meant completely. Nevertheless, she approached the column of soldiers arrayed against her, marching to her trembling son Zhongzong and the military leader of this apparent coup d'etat. Though she tinged her words with contempt for this move against her, she was willing at last to yield the throne to her heir, Li Xian, Emperor Zhongzong. Then, her time as the Empress Regnant of China officially at its end, this shrunken, frail, sick, 90-year-old woman simply went back to bed. She would be moved under heavy guard the following day to a smaller but nevertheless still imperial palace, and on March 3rd, the Zhou Dynasty was ended with the official

restoration of the Tang. Empress Wu would write a final edict before her death later that year. In it, she directed that she should no longer be referred to as Huangdi, or Emperor, but rather as Zetian Daxiang Huanghou, the Holy Empress Zetian. And then, she died, peacefully in her sleep, on December 16th, year 705, at between 90 and 92 years old, having lived in the imperial court for more than 75 years, been Empress of China for 35 years, and reigned supreme as divine sovereign for 15 years, the first and last woman emperor of China. But even though our Empress Wu, lover or hater, is dead and gone, we are not quite done with her yet. On the whole, how best are we to understand this singular period in Chinese history, as well as this singular woman?

For more than a thousand years, those who wrote of her did so in only the most spiteful, biased terms. Usurper, child killer, poisoner, terroristic autocrat. The Song Dynasty historian Yuan Shu would entitle of this whole period in his 13th century tome The Calamity of the Empresses Wu and Wei. And that kind of says it all, right? It has only been the second half of the 20th century and beyond that Wu Zhao's reputation has been rehabilitated and painted in a more sympathetic light by cutting through the more obvious exaggerations and smear jobs. that Wu Zhao's reputation has been rehabilitated and painted in a more sympathetic light, by cutting through the more obvious exaggerations and smear jobs.

When all is said and done, was she really as bad as Sima Guang or Yuan Shu or Liu Lu, etc., would have us believe? By now, of course, I hope we're all pretty much on the same page that, no, she was not the monster her critics have historically painted her as. But nor was she some people's champion, as Maoist propaganda would retell it in the 1950s. At least, not unless it furthered a more significant personal goal, which was power over her rivals. Usually, I would tend to say that our modern perspective will tend to tint our understandings of past events. Rendering judgment on the actions of people whose motives and drives are totally alien to our own is mostly neither helpful nor accurate. Certainly, if we're to try to understand the reasons why the later imperial

historians were so scathingly critical of Wu's time in power, we must understand it from their own deeply Confucian, pro-traditional, anti-innovative perspectives. But funnily enough, our modern perspective might actually help to serve and unspin the historians' biased accounts and more blatant misattributions. In the 20th century, after all, the idea of a woman being equally as capable of strong or even brutally authoritarian rule as her male counterparts is taken for granted, blasé even. So when we unwind this anti-female spin job, we're left to evaluate her reign on its own merits. So, by that measure, how did she do? Wu Zetian's period of reign we can probably most strongly characterize as one of consolidation of imperial power in the body of the sovereign.

It was, in essence, the unmaking of Emperor Taizong's bureaucracy at the fundamental levels. You'll recall that Taizong's tireless work ethic and forceful personality had fostered a style of rule that suited him completely, which was surrounded by a cadre of elite, trusted friends to advise him, and call him out when he was wrong when necessary. That had fit his style of rule like a glove, but when he had gone, that strong cadre of bureaucrats had remained, and under the rule of a far more timid and weak sovereign in the form of Gaozong, the balance of power had tipped heavily in favor of the imperial chancellors, a situation that time and again had been shown to be ultimately fatal for a ruling house. Hi everyone, this is Scott. If you want to learn about the world's oldest civilizations, find out how they were rediscovered, follow the story of Mark Antony and Cleopatra's descendants

over ten generations, or take a deep dive into the Iron Age or the Hellenistic era, then check out the Ancient World Podcast. Available on all podcasting platforms, or go to ancientworldpodcast.com. That's the Ancient World Podcast. Empress Wu Zhao then had taken that on and rolled that creeping decentralization almost all the way back to square one. It was a reign of centralization. And then put a hard cap on how powerful any official could seek to become. This had been less a well-thought-out policy, perhaps, than a pure survival mechanism against a class of people she saw, usually rightly,

as her intractable enemies. The adversarial nature of her unlikely rise to power forced her to center state authority back on the person of the monarch since she was unable to trust anyone else with it. At the same time, she encouraged expansion and widespread usage of the imperial examination system to fill the posts that opened up in the imperial bureaucracy once she began her purges of the social order. At the foundation of the Tang dynasty, less than 7% of officeholders held a degree from an imperial college, but by the time of Wu's Zhou dynasty, that figure had mushroomed to more than 40%. Further, the exam's status among nobility and peasantry alike as a way to maintain or

enhance one's own power within the governmental order spurred many to flock to the cities and their centralized authority, rather than remain diffuse in their agrarian and feudal locales. Thus, a glut of educated wannabe officials would filter back to the regional and local posts as well, since the number of graduates quickly outpaced the number of imperial posts available by ten to one, resulting in an empire-wide boost to the officialdom's overall competence in office. At their core, really, almost all of the classical historian's criticisms and condemnations of Wu Zetian's reign are rooted first and foremost in the wrongness of her sex. Confucian teachings,

of course, explicitly forbid female participation in politics at any level. But even critics' other, seemingly unrelated condemnations of Wu's reign are almost ridiculously hypocritical when compared to Chinese monarchs before and after her. She was a usurper, yes, but then so were Gaozu and Taizong before her. That she potentially, and to be honest quite likely, arranged for the death of at least one of her children, as well as other family members is horrible, of course, but is it so much more so than other emperors gladly slitting their brothers, cousins, or father's throat to secure power? Confucian historians also deride her expansionistic foreign policies, but that especially is laughable when placed alongside the non-criticisms they give to Taizong or Gaozong's expansionistic warmongerings.

Potentially, one of the biggest criticisms of Empress Wu that actually sticks when we go ahead and disregard her woman-ness is her economic policy, or rather, lack thereof. But even though the Tang and Zhou period of Empress Wu's reign was wracked by economic policy, or rather lack thereof. But even though the Tang and Zhou period of Empress Wu's reign was wracked by economic troubles, they had hardly been of Wu's making. Most she had simply inherited from her predecessors. And if she made some worse with her lackluster, scattershot quick fixes, that certainly makes her no worse than any number of monarchs facing economic crises. And the fact that the empire emerged strong and economically more or less intact, in spite of three external wars,

spates of rebellion, and currency devaluation so severe they'd authorized limited use of counterfeit coins to cover the difference, well that certainly puts her squarely ahead of, say, Yang of Sui's economic train wreck at the end of his reign. Indeed, in spite of the currency issue, on the whole, for vast swaths of the peasantry, you know, the 99% of the population that classical historians turn a completely blind eye to, life was pretty darn good under the woman emperor. Though she faced numerous rebellions against her reign, it's extremely important to note that none of them were agrarian or peasant rebellions, but instead stemmed completely from the aristocracy. She, by all accounts, held the hearts of the people.

A 10th century stele, unearthed in the mid-20th century in Sichuan, had inscribed words to this effect, quote, In times of natural disasters, flood, or drought, the soldiery and the people alike who pray here, at this temple of the Celestial Empress Zetian, cannot but have their prayers answered. Even Mu Zhao's harshest critics were forced, and you can practically hear their teeth grinding together as they write the words on the page, forced to acknowledge at least some of the positive aspects of her period of rule. Liu Xu writes in the Old Book of Tang, for instance, She respected the will of the times and suppressed her favorites, and listened to honest words and ended the terror of the secret police officials. This was good. This was good. End quote. Sima Guang is likewise

forced to concede her widespread popularity and the populace's resistance to rebellion against her in his otherwise consistently hostile account in the Zizhetongjian. More modern historians have seen Wu's reign in a far more understanding light. C.P. Fitzgerald summed up his analysis in his 1968 book The Empress Wu, quote, without Wu there would have been no long-enduring Tang dynasty, and perhaps no lasting unity of China, end quote. Meanwhile, Guizhou would put it a decade later, in another of his publications, that she was, on balance, not so different or worse than the other emperors of her age. Quote,

The Empress was a woman of her times. Her social, economic, and judicial views could hardly be termed advanced, and her politics differed from those of her predecessors, chiefly in their greater pragmatism and ruthlessness. End quote. Ultimately, though, we are forced to concede that in spite of the multitudes of stories, tellings, and interpretations of this singular period of Chinese history, and the singular woman at its center, we still know almost nothing about her. We can unwind at least some of the historical hatery to better see her reign and its consequences

untainted by Confucian soapboxing, but the person of who Wu Zhao was remains forever hidden behind the historical veil. Like so many people who have become symbols, good and bad, her unique period of rule over the Middle Kingdom can, and has, been twisted to reflect whatever the teller wishes it to be, and the actual human behind those stories is frequently lost in the translation. Who was Wu, really? We may never know beyond educated guesswork, and she wasn't very helpful either. When Empress Zetian died in 705 at age 90, her body was laid to rest at a typically lavish imperial tomb some 50 miles north of Chang'an. It's still there, approached via a mile-long causeway running between two low hills topped with watchtowers,

known today as Nipple Hills, because Chinese tradition holds that this spot was selected because the hills reminded Gao Zong of the young Wu's breasts. Mike Dash writes in the Smithsonian article, The Demonization of Empress Wu, At the end of this spirit road, the tomb itself lies in a remarkably inaccessible spot, set into a mountain at the end of a winding forest path. Along this spirit road to her tomb site, among the statues of winged horses, lions, ostriches, officials, and envoys, is a feature familiar to almost every emperor of China, stone steles. Two of them, in fact. The first is more than 20 feet tall, and for Emperor Gaozong. The second is an even larger one for Empress Wu, which stands almost 25 feet tall and weighs approximately 98 tons. Gaozong's stele, like most, commemorates his reign

by detailing the accomplishments during his time as divine sovereign, a memorialization that fills the entire massive carved block. The Empress of Stele, however, sits in stark contrast to the husbands she dominated for more than two decades. It was set in place during Wu's life, undoubtedly with the full expectation that, like she had for her husband and emperors had done for their predecessors since time immemorial, her own successor would fill its sides with her deeds and exploits. Yet carved onto her staley's face is nothing at all, save for the wear of time. It has sat empty and wordless for more than thirteen hundred years, a stark, silent reminder of the discrimination her rule faced and the scorn heaped at her feet for little more than the crime of daring to be a woman who took the throne. Though the strictures

of the Chinese bureaucracy and record-keeping rigidity prevented her from being simply deleted from the pages of history altogether, nevertheless the silence about Wu speaks volumes, frustratingly raising further questions while stubbornly refusing to answer any. It would seem that they never could find the words to encapsulate such a tremendous person as she. And so, here, we at last part ways with Wu Zhao, the Empress Zetian, though her effects will be felt by Imperial China and the restored Tang Dynasty for centuries to come. So next time, we will be facing the two second reigns of Wu's two deposed sons, Zhongzong and Ruizong, as well as the wacky misadventures of Wu Zhao Jr., that is, Princess Taiping. Oh, did I say wacky? I meant deadly. Thank you for listening. The History of England at agorapodcastnetwork.com, or on iTunes, or your podcatcher of choice. Please also join THOC on Facebook, Twitter, or our home on the web at thehistoryofchina.wordpress.com.

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