Wu Zetian

A Junior Concubine at Thirteen

Wu Zhao — the name she was born with; history remembers her as Wu Zetian — entered the palace of Emperor Taizong around 637 and was sent to a convent when he died, which was the end of most such careers. Gaozong, Taizong's son and the new emperor, brought her back. By 655 she had deposed the sitting empress, Empress Wang, and taken her place, and after Gaozong's strokes from 660 she was effectively governing. When he died in 683 she ruled as regent for two of her own sons in turn, deposing the first after fifty-five days and, in 690, setting the second aside too to declare herself emperor of a new dynasty, the Zhou, named for the ancient dynasty Confucius had lived under. She is the only woman in three thousand years of Chinese history to hold that title in her own name rather than beside a husband or a son. She widened the examination system and promoted men on ability rather than birth, breaking the grip of aristocratic families that had dominated politics for generations. The borders held. She ran the empire for roughly half a century.

A Tomb With No Inscription

In 705, around eighty-one and ill, she was removed in a palace coup by her own ministers, who restored her son — the same one she had deposed twenty-one years before — and the Tang. She died months later. She had asked to be buried not as an emperor but as an empress, beside Gaozong. The stele raised at her tomb stands over seven meters high and carries no inscription at all. Nobody knows on whose instruction. The blankness has been read as arrogance, as shame, and as a verdict deliberately left to whoever came later.