Even if Tuthmosis’s attack on Hatshepsut’s memory was nothing personal, it was something of a fatal blow. It has taken more than 150 years to piece together a satisfying biography of the princess who became pharaoh, and gaps still puzzle and confound. Fortunately, Tuthmosis’s crew of statuechiselers didn’t get everything. One of three sarcophagi Hatshepsut made for herself was unearthed in 1903 (it was empty), and the stones that covered the inscriptions on her obelisks had helped preserve them.
Hatshepsut’s mummy was found in the early part of the twentieth century; it had been unceremoniously dumped on the floor of an obscure tomb in the Valley of the Kings and robbed of its jewelry by looters. For more than two decades archeologists were unable to connect this sad pile of bones, bereft of golden afterlife accessories, to the woman who had ruled Egypt. It wasn’t until 2007 that scientists were able to definitively claim that this was the body of the mysterious female pharaoh.
Still, the discovery of her mummy can’t explain why Hatshepsut did what she did—why she shoved aside the rightful ruler, crowned herself pharaoh, and embarked on a prodigious campaign of propaganda to legitimize her claim. Dynastic crisis, a thirst for power, political wrangling, a need to assert authority, a hunger for glory—all are possibilities that historians have batted around. None are truly satisfying. At the end of the day, all we really know is that Hatshepsut was a remarkable woman: one who assumed supreme executive power, and did so without apology.
A FAMILY AFFAIR:
A WORD ABOUT ROYAL INCEST
Most cultures have incest taboos, but throughout history many royal families have been exempt. Why?
First and foremost, the practice is a way of ensuring that power stays within the same family. Brother–sister and even parent–child marriages were not uncommon in ancient Egypt, Incan Peru, or nineteenth-century Thailand and were a crafty way to keep sovereignty concentrated within a single family.
Second, some cultures believed that incest reflected the behavior of their gods. Emulating the practice strengthened the link between divinity and earthly rulers. In the early 1800s, for example, the chiefs of Hawaii encouraged a marriage between Princess Nahi’ena’ena and her brother, King Kamehameha III, citing a precedent among the old deities. That didn’t go over so well with the newly arrived Christian missionaries, and instead the princess was married off to someone else, though she and her brother continued to have a sexual relationship until her death in 1836.
Third, incest set royalty apart, giving them license to do something no one else could. If you were a dutiful Catholic monarch, you could even get papal dispensation to allow your consanguineous marriage, making it acceptable in the eyes of God and man. The average Joe, meanwhile, can’t even skip Sunday mass without putting his immortal soul in jeopardy.
But let’s not forget that there’s one very good reason why marriage between close relations is a bad, and almost universally reviled, idea: the lack of genetic variation between sexual partners can cause a match-up of harmful recessive genes, leading to significant congenital defects. The famous Egyptian pharaoh Tutankhamun’s partially cleft palate and clubfoot can probably be attributed to his parents being full siblings. Like King Tut, children of the royal houses of Europe were also victims of the need to consolidate and retain power. Marriage between cousins, even first cousins, was fully within bounds well into the twentieth century, with such unfortunate consequences as mental illness and hemophilia.
The Spanish Hapsburgs offer a cautionary tale of the problems that can come from incest. The family ruled Spain for nearly 200 years, all the while encouraging ever-closer relations to wed. The line came to a spectacular end with Charles II, the son of an uncle and his niece who were themselves mildly inbred. Charles was born mentally and physically disabled, afflicted by a tongue so large he couldn’t speak until the age of 4 and a body so weak he didn’t walk until 8. Later in life, he exhibited signs of mania, demanding, for example, that the bodies of his dead relatives be exhumed so he could look at them. Charles died without an heir in 1700, just five days before his 39th birthday. That he’d lived so long was a shock to most of Europe; the coroner who examined his body reportedly claimed that it “contained not a single drop of blood, his heart looked like the size of a grain of pepper, his lungs were corroded, his intestines were putrid and gangrenous, he had a single testicle which was as black as carbon and his head was full of water.”
Wu Zetian
THE PRINCESS WHO BECAME EMPEROR OF CHINA
FEBRUARY 17, 624–DECEMBER 16, 705
TANG DYNASTY CHINA
Wu Zetian had “a heart like a serpent and a nature like that of a wolf,” “favored evil sycophants and destroyed good and loyal officials,” and “killed her sister, butchered her elder brothers, murdered the ruler, poisoned her mother. She is hated by gods and men alike.”
Or so people said. Teasing out the real story from the tangle of official histories, which tend to be heavily weighted against female rulers, is tricky. In these accounts, she comes off as sadistic, cruel, and power hungry. But she managed to accomplish what no other woman did in the 3,000-year history of imperial China: rule in her own right. That she had to kill a few people to do it—including, allegedly, her own week-old daughter—was the price of power.
TRUE WU
Perhaps the most horrifying story about Wu was how she became empress. A minor princess of the Tang dynasty, Wu was a royal concubine who had long plotted to move up the ranks. When she had a baby girl by Emperor Gaozong—not her first child with him—she saw her chance. As was custom, the current empress came down to Wu’s apartments to coo over the new child. After Empress Wang left, Wu quickly smothered the baby. When Gaozong arrived to visit, he found his daughter dead in the crib, with a distraught and weeping Wu claiming that Wang must have killed her. Gaozong believed the lie, and the empress was packed off to a deep, dank dungeon, soon to be joined by another of Wu’s rivals: the emperor’s second-favorite concubine. As if that wasn’t bad enough, once Wu became empress, she went down to the prison to punish her former nemeses. She had them beaten with a hundred lashes, their hands and feet chopped off, their arms and legs broken, and then ordered the women—who were still alive—dumped into a vat of wine to drown. As she watched them struggling vainly, she cackled, “Now these two witches can get drunk to their bones.”
If true, that is the kind of evil even a horror movie franchise wouldn’t touch. But though Wu did have a murderous, Machiavellian-before-Machiavelli streak, it’s also true that her demonization by historians was fueled by a lot of false propaganda. Many thought Wu disrupted the Confucian order of things just by being a woman, and even more so by first ruling through her husband and then usurping the throne from her own sons. Folks didn’t look too kindly on such behavior, and if you’re going to write a cautionary tale, why not throw in all the infanticide and grisly murder you can?
To understand how Wu came to power, and why she did what she did, you have to understand that Tang dynasty China was a viper pit. A glorious viper pit—the height of Chinese ancient civilization, a golden age of poetry and legal enlightenment, and all sorts of great stuff (and which owed its existence to Princess Pingyang; see chapter 2)—but a viper pit nonetheless. Inconvenient people were “invited” to commit suicide, and often helped along if they failed to comply. Murder, especially among relatives, wasn’t uncommon. Even more often, citizens brought false charges against political rivals in the hopes their enemies would be executed. If some historical texts are to be believed, the palace halls must have run red with the blood of the executed, the assassinated, and the conveniently suicidal.
Before she was slaughtering rivals, Wu was the daughter of a governor and a lady; she was a princess, but just barely. And though as a teenager she was a concubine in the imperial household, she was really little more than a maid, chiefly employed to change the emperor’s bed linens. Though Wu appears to have been endowed with remarkable physical beauty as well as intelligence, such attributes
would not have been enough to get her into the royal bed she turned down so faithfully. Still, Emperor Taizong did notice her, calling her his “Fair Flatterer,” after a popular song. According to some sources, Wu would perform a certain sexual act (exactly what has been lost to history) that other ladies would not, earning her additional affections from the old ruler.
Taizong’s death in 649 seems to have led directly to Wu hooking up with his son, Gaozong, who also had taken a shine to the concubine princess. According to the official dynastic history, Gaozong first noticed Wu, now in her twenties, when she was nursing his sick father on his deathbed. Other reports claimed that Wu offered Gaozong a bowl of water to wash his hands after he went to the bathroom. When he inadvertently flicked water in her face, marring her white makeup, she said, “I accept Heaven’s favor of rain and mist,” apparently a naughty poetic reference to sex and some really interesting foreplay. However they met, the two were definitely intimate before the old emperor was dead. (In true Tang imperial fashion, Gaozong’s way to the throne was cleared by the fortuitous deaths and executions of four of his brothers.)
Confucian law declared that relations between a son and his father’s concubine constituted incest, so Wu and Gaozong’s budding relationship was kept secret. Moreover, custom dictated that after the emperor’s death, Wu had to shave her head and be committed to a convent, although she spent only a few months sequestered (and didn’t cut off her hair). Evidently, Gaozong liked her enough to knock her up and then spring her from the nunnery to serve as one of his concubines.
Wu soon became the emperor’s favorite, through a combination of sexy insect-inspired eyebrows, duplicitous cunning, and near-constant pregnancy. One contemporary wrote, “Lady Wu, with her lovely eyebrows arched like the antennae of a butterfly, yields to no woman, but coyly hides her face behind her long sleeve and applies herself to slandering others, knowing her vixen charms hold the power to bewitch the emperor.” Meanwhile, in her first five years in Gaozong’s harem, Wu produced three, possibly four, children, and there’s nothing so appealing to an emperor as fertility.
It was around this time that Wu supposedly smothered her own child and did away with her rivals in remarkably grisly fashion. The infanticide is probably untrue, given Wu’s later reluctance to harm her own children directly (exile was her preferred method for dealing with disobedient offspring). It’s quite possible the baby died of natural causes, and Wu took the opportunity to blame her rival for the death. Either way, that wasn’t what brought down Empress Wang—it was her inability to produce a male heir. Ultimately, Gaozong (likely prompted by Wu) claimed that his wife, along with his second-favored concubine, was plotting to poison him. Sentencing them both to prison was the perfect pretext for making room for baby-making Wu.
MADAM EMPEROR
Wu and Gaozong appeared to have ruled “jointly,” although some historians claim she was the real power. By 660 she was a fixture in the throne room, observing all of her husband’s audiences and offering advice and pronouncements from behind a screen. After Gaozong suffered a series of strokes that left him half blind and unable to walk or speak, Wu assumed his official duties, and the screen was taken down.
Upon Gaozong’s death in 683, Wu became empress dowager, a title that usually indicates it’s time to leave the stage. But Wu’s final act was yet to come. With her son nominally on the throne (after, it should be noted, the deaths of his two older brothers, at least one of which was indirectly ascribed to Wu), Wu now held the real power. And when this son proved to be less malleable than she’d hoped, she had him exiled to a distant province and replaced with another son. (Not for nothing did she also have the Chinese word prince changed to be made up of the characters meaning “one who keeps a peaceful mouth.”)
Four years after Gaozong’s death, Wu was done trying to rule through her sons. After a carefully cultivated campaign of prophecy, public relations, and propaganda, she declared herself “Sage Mother, Holy Sovereign,” giving herself extraordinary power. But even that wasn’t enough. Three years later, in 690, she shrugged off the “Sage Mother” mantle and declared herself emperor.
Wu ruled through a combination of public relations shrewdness and secret-police terror. By declaring herself emperor, she effectively ended the Tang dynasty and started her own, the Zhou, angering the remaining imperial family members. To silence her critics, she had them all exiled or executed. She had always relied heavily on informants, creating an atmosphere of distrust and fear. She’d had copper “suggestion boxes” posted in cities, allowing people to anonymously report information on rivals, and invited anyone with useful information to travel to the palace on her dime. The fruits of that information could be deadly; between 684 and 693, Wu went through 46 chief ministers, half of whom were murdered or committed suicide. After outliving his usefulness, her supposed lover, the Rasputin-like leader of a Buddhist cult, was beaten to death on her command. Even her own relatives lived in mortal fear they’d become “inconvenient.”
According to Chinese chroniclers in later centuries, Wu was also free with her sexual favors, supposedly forming her own male harem at the advanced age of 66. She reportedly entertained a string of inappropriate lovers, including a well-endowed peddler, a pair of smooth-cheeked singing brothers, and her own nephew. (Take all that with a big grain of salt, though—the easiest way to slander a woman in any era is to call her a slut.)
But Wu also ruled effectively, benignly, and even wisely over a nation of 50 million. Her subjects didn’t see Emperor Wu as a dangerous monster or a tyrant; she united the kingdom at a time when it appeared to be disintegrating. Not only did she manage to keep the empire together and end the predations of the Tartars, who were ripping apart the northern border, she also expanded its territory, doing so with remarkably few wars.
Under Wu, as both empress and emperor, taxes decreased, financial waste and military expenditure were reduced, retirees got pensions, and salaries of deserving officials rose. She introduced the system of entrance examinations for bureaucratic service, a huge step toward meritocracy and away from nepotism. She passed legislation allowing children to mourn the death of both parents, not just the father, as had been custom and law. Under her rule, Chinese generals helped Korea oust their Japanese overlords and unite under a new king. The Japanese were so impressed that they started copying everything the Tang did, right down to building their capital city in imitation of China’s capital.
FORCED RETIREMENT
Wu ruled for 15 years as emperor before anyone got up the nerve and resources to challenge her. In 705, a faction of Tang loyalists, headed by Wu’s exiled son, suggested that it was time for her to abdicate the throne. When Wu didn’t take the hint, her pair of singing lovers was found murdered, their bodies placed in her rooms. When she still didn’t take the hint, a knife was held to her throat and she was forced to “retire.”
Wu died later that year—of natural causes, surprisingly—after ruling ably and peacefully for the better part of 50 years. She had used the same tools as emperors had for many a generation before her: execution, banishment, terror. But such behavior has been deemed unbecoming of a woman, and Wu has gotten short shrift.
How later rulers felt about Wu is clear by how they chose to remember—or in this case not remember—her. Chinese tradition at the time dictated that rulers be buried in sumptuous tombs marked with huge memorial tablets. Usually, the tablets were covered with details of all the great and glorious deeds the ruler had done and how he would be missed. Not so with Wu. Her tablet remained blank, a mute testament to women who accomplished much, but about whom no one had a good word to say.
WEI’S WAY
Empress Wu Zetian wasn’t the only crafty woman in imperial China. In 684, Wu had her son Li Xian kicked off the throne and exiled to a remote outpost. He brought along his wife, Princess Wei, and lucky for him he did: if it weren’t for Wei’s constant goading and admonitions, Li Xian probably would have committed suicide while in exile.
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p; It likely wasn’t out of love for her husband that Wei talked him down—she simply was not about to let the chance to become empress pass by twice. When, in 705, the opportunity finally came again, she seized it. A group of Tang family loyalists took Li Xian as their leader and deposed Emperor Wu; Li Xian became Emperor Zhongzong, and he and his wife, Empress Wei, made their way back to the palace.
Now sitting pretty on the throne, Empress Wei had an affair with Wu’s nephew Sansi, who was having an affair with the emperor’s old private secretary. This wicked threesome made a fortune selling official posts, but the power still wasn’t enough. Wei and Sansi, who by that time had been elevated to a high ministerial post, proposed that the imperial daughter, Princess Anle, be named heir apparent. Not so fast, cried the legitimate crown prince, Li Chongjun, who marched on the palace but was repelled after his own troops turned on their commanders.
Despite the setback, Wei and Anle weren’t cowed. Three years later, they finally pulled off their own coup, killing Emperor Zhongzong with a poisoned cake and installing a more malleable son, Li Chongmao, on the throne. Inspired by Wu, they planned to rule through him while preparing to install Anle on the throne as China’s second female emperor. Unfortunately for them, Wu Zetian’s daughter Princess Taiping got wind of the plan first and went to battle on behalf of her brother Ruizong. Anle’s head was lopped off while she was putting on eye makeup.
But as usual, things weren’t exactly what they seemed. Ruizong knew full well that his sister, Princess Taiping, was only biding her time until she could make her own attempt to steal the crown. So he got crafty. First, he named his son Xuanzong to be his successor and abdicated the throne; then he had Xuanzong move on Taiping, based on the claim that she was about to try to depose him. After several of her men were killed, Taiping fled to a Buddhist monastery, where she was “allowed” to kill herself.
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