The Boxes in the Courtyard
c. 686 · Wu Zetian, after repeated plots against her, one that got an armed man into the outer palace
There have been three plots in two years. One of them got a man with a knife inside the outer palace, and one of them involved a prince of the old dynasty, and the reason she found out about any of them is that somebody frightened decided to talk.
Her problem is structural. She is a woman holding the seals in a system that regards that as a disorder in the heavens, and the men who would remove her are the same men who staff the offices that would report a conspiracy. The information cannot travel up through them because it is about them.
So: bronze boxes in the palace courtyard, open to anyone. Any person in the empire may put in a sealed accusation, unsigned, and it goes straight to her. Travel to the capital is paid for. Nobody in between reads it.
It will work. It will bring in every real plot in the empire, and also every grudge, every debt, every neighbor with a boundary dispute; and men will be tortured on the word of people who will never have to give their names.
Open the boxes
Rule without themOn your own? Play it first, then reveal.
Reveal what happened
What really happened
Wu Zetian opened them, and they did both things. The system caught real conspiracies and it also produced a class of professional accusers (the 'cruel officials'), one of whom, Lai Junchen, wrote a manual on extracting confessions. Much of the Tang aristocracy died in it. She also, in the same decades, widened the imperial examinations and promoted men on ability rather than birth, breaking the grip of the north-western clans; the borders held and the empire ran. In 690 she took the throne in her own name, the only woman in three thousand years of Chinese history to do it. Every account of her was written afterwards by men for whom a woman on the throne was a disorder in the cosmos, and the worst charges against her have no independent source.
The philosophers weigh in
Open them"People are not born good. Left unwatched they take what is available, and a court is the place where the most is available. She built the instrument the situation required and it did what such instruments do."
No boxes"In Alexandria we learned what happens when a city decides that an accusation is the same as a fact. It does not stop at the guilty and it does not stop when the danger has passed."