These two likenesses of the only woman who ruled China outright (instead of from behind a puppet) epitomize the historical debate that has shrouded her for centuries. She could have been a ruthless dragon lady who even Cersei Lannister would find off putting – OR, she could have been suffering the same plight as female leaders of today: rampant double standard.
Wu’s path to power was – shall we say – murky. Not much is known for certain about her early life but she came to be a part of the Tang Imperial court as a concubine to the Taizong Emperor. She didn’t have any children with him and he may not have found her especially interesting compared to his other consorts. However, there is speculation that she had an affair with one of the Taizong Emperor’s son’s – Li Zhi – while the old man was still kicking.
After the Taizong Emperor’s death, Li Zhi (Wu’s Boo) succeeded him as the Gaozong Emperor. Wu, but this point, had been bundled off to a Buddhist convent where, as tradition dictated, she was supposed to live out her days as a chaste nun – but Wu wasn’t much for tradition, so she made her way back to the Tang court where the newly-minted emperor made her one of his concubines.
Here, the details get murky again. There was clearly (as one would expect) competition among the Emperor’s women over his favor and influence at court. The most toxic of these rivalries was between Wu (then Consort Wu) and the Empress Consort Wang.
As far as my understanding goes, the Empress was sort of like the Emperor’s wife and was the only woman in the harem who had any real status unless the Emperor’s mother, aka Empress Dowager, was still kicking. Concubines – who had a ranking system unto themselves – we sort of like secondary wives whose only official roles were to make babies and please the Emperor. Any children of concubines were legitimate issue of the Emperor - a nice insurance policy in case the Empress was infertile, and something that certain European kings with lots of bastards and no legitimate heirs might have benefited from.
Following this logic, Wang had more status than Wu, but the Emperor seemed to have liked Wu more. Wang had no children, while other concubines – Wu included – did, leading to a further point of contention. This rivalry came to a head with the death of Wu’s infant daughter. Wu blamed the infant’s death on Wang, leading some to believe that Wu might have killed her own baby to make Wang look bad. Some conceded that maybe Wang did kill the kid due to jealousy, while still others suggest that the baby could have died due to carbon monoxide poisoning since the Tang court burned coal for heat and lacked proper ventilation systems. We will never know. But what we do know is that the infant’s death resulted in Wang’s dismissal and Wu’s ascension as the new Sheriff in town – i.e. she was now Empress Consort.
Further machinations may have ensued and after the death of the Gaozong Emperor, Wu acted as regent to her sons (possibly favoring an easier to manipulate one) and ruled in the fashion more common for women – guiding the actions of her young, impressionable son – before seizing power in her own right, something unprecedented, and indeed, unrepeated, in Chinese history.
The anomalous way in which she came to power, may account somewhat for how she was traditionally viewed in Chinese historiography. As Mike Dash phrased it in his blog post for Smithsonian Magazine,“…imperial history was written to provide lessons for future rulers, and as such tended to be weighted heavily against usurpers (which Wu was) and anyone who offended the Confucian sensibilities of the scholars who labored over them (which Wu did simply by being a woman).”
But, with the distance of several centuries, some historians are re-evaluating Wu’s contribution, suggesting that she may have protected and fostered certain developments that made the Tang Dynasty a Golden Age.
Wu was Empress fairly early in the Tang Dynasty which lasted from 618-906 CE. Wu ruled unofficially from 683-690 as regent, and held power officially until she “retired” a few months before her death in 705, and some of the hallmarks of the Tang Dynasty were certainly in place during Wu’s time, if not implemented by Wu herself. The Tang Dynasty was an internationalist, cosmopolitan, cultural giant and regional superpower enriched by the Silk Road trade that passed through the capital of Chang’an. As merchants are wont to do, they brought not only goods, but also ideas. Chang’an was said to have Buddhist and Taoist temples, Christian Churches, and Mosques. Buddhism in particular became a popular religion in Tang China – spreading from there to Korea and Japan – something that Wu may have also had a hand in, given her support of the religion. (Another reason she would be in the Historical Dog House since some Confucians viewed Buddhism as a “barbarian” religion that by Confucian standards encouraged “selfishness.”)
Wu also supported certain aspects of Confucianism – such as by implementing the famous meritocratic civil service exam system. (Unlike in the United States, bureaucrats were the elite, not reviled bean counters.) She also extended Confucian mourning rites to be applied to one’s mother, as well as one’s father.
It is debatable how much Wu herself had to do with it, but the Tang Dynasty was a relatively good time to be an elite woman in China. Funerary objects (see video) suggest that women could engage in most of the same activities as men at the time, and were not as restricted in their social movements or styles of dress as they would be in later dynasties. (No footbinding yet!) I personally suspect that the cosmopolitan outlook of the empire as a whole, and the prominence of Buddhism over Confucianism were much more responsible for the relative freedoms of women during this period, than any edicts that Empress Wu made.
So, yes, Wu may have murdered her children, knocked off rivals, and had a sexual appetite – but, when weighed against her accomplishments, imagine how those behaviors might have been judged if she were male.
Better yet, take the behaviors of kings – like Henry VIII and his six wives. How might he have been judged differently if he had been Henrietta who had six husbands, whom she regularly abandoned for younger, more attractive men, punished (sometimes with execution) for not giving her sufficiently gendered children, who probably contracted syphilis from said love affairs and passed it on to her husbands, who became obese, and in her 50s married a 19-year-old? Suffice to say, as much as we love to hate Henry VIII, we would probably hate Henrietta more.
Sources:
I
highly recommend Mike Dash’s post for Smithsonian
Magazine: The
Demonization of Empress Wu
Old
Faithful: Wikipedia
The
Met Museum: Tang
Dynasty
The
Met Museum: Internationalism
in the Tang Dynasty
Although
I did not personally read it for this post, if you are interested in this
period, you may want to check out China’s
Cosmopolitan Empire: The Tang Dynasty by Mark Edward Lewis
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