by John Keay
More accurately, it was the new empress’s dispensation; and perhaps to ensure against any backsliding among her supporters, she reportedly consummated her coup by having the ex-empress surgically dismembered limb by limb and then drowned in a vat of wine. This revolting procedure would be more credible were it not for the fate, 850 years earlier, of Lady Chi, alias the ‘human pig’. Falling foul of the Empress Lü – she being the lifetime consort and effective successor of Han Gaozu (‘Great Progenitor’ of the Han dynasty) – this Lady Chi, according to the Shiji, had also been disjointed, her limbless torso being left to rootle to death in a dung-heap. Quite aside from whether dismemberment would not in itself have been fatal, the resemblance between the two cases prompts suspicion. Possibly empresses bent on revenge looked to precedent for inspiration; more probably historians bent on traducing them lacked imagination.
Comparisons with the Empress Lü were drawn throughout Wu Zetian’s life and would give rise to much subsequent moralising on the venomous character of female rulers. C. P. Fitzgerald, Wu’s English biographer, cites a saying that might be loosely rendered as:
Wayward, not wanton, was Empress Lü;
Wanton, not wayward, the Empress Wu.9
Lü, in other words, had been erratic and disorderly though not particularly promiscuous; Wu was capable and efficient but insatiably promiscuous. Her ability was actually conceded in what could have been a slip of the pen by one of the Tang histories: ‘She was perspicacious, and rapid and sure in decision. Therefore all the brave and eminent of the epoch were glad to serve her and found opportunity to do so.’10 Repeatedly she outwitted opponents, stymied rebellion, defended and extended the frontiers, and launched grand dynastic initiatives. Gaozong, the emperor, while he lasted, ‘sat with folded hands’, says Sima Guang; it was she who exercised supreme power; ‘promotion or demotion, life or death, were settled by her word’.11
Needing all the legitimacy she could muster, she was drawn to the revival of the ultra-orthodox practices and terminology of the Zhou, much like Wang Mang; and to mark her assumption of the emperorship in 690 she would actually adopt the dynastic name of Zhou, like Yuwen Tai of the Northern Zhou. Luoyang, the Zhou eastern capital, was reconstituted as the Tang eastern capital, and at great expense the court and most of the administration shuttled to and fro from Chang’an. In 666 she accompanied Gaozong to Shandong, where, for the first time since Han Guang Wudi in AD 56, the emperor appraised Heaven of the dynasty’s achievements by performing the great ritual sacrifices at Mount Tai. Not to appear a mere onlooker, Wu Zetian devised a parallel ceremony involving the imperial womenfolk. She evidently took her feminist responsibilities seriously. A ceiling was imposed on the value of marriage dowries, the mourning period for deceased mothers was made the same as that for deceased fathers, and among her various literary commissions was a collection of biographies of eminent women. Latterly her daughter (the Taiping Princess) and an eminent lady scholar (Shangguan Wan’er) would constitute something of a petticoat government.
Reigns of terror, during which informants were rewarded and the innocent convicted, were more than matched by amnesties, remissions and grand proclamations promising economies and tax cuts. Remonstrators were invited to remonstrate; the kangaroo courts were quickly dismantled. To Tang historians these were just amateurish attempts to curry favour; but to Marxists they would appear humane, even revolutionary, con cessions; and since they seem to have served their conciliatory purpose, they may at least be considered statesman-like.
In reconciling all sections of society to the novelty of her rule, no ideological stone was left unturned. Besides wooing Confucian opinion, Wu Zetian dallied with Daoist sages and showered the Buddhist sangha with favours. How much of this ecumenism was dictated by statecraft, how much by devotional caprice and how much by sexual convenience is unclear. Her Daoist phase does seem to have dovetailed with the ascendancy at court of a potent Daoist practitioner, while her Buddhist fervour peaked during a long and passionate liaison with an abbot. He was originally a cosmetics salesman who, for easy access to the female quarters of the palace, had taken vows, none of which he kept. Outside his duties in the empress’s apartments, he distinguished himself by discovering a text that was interpreted as foretelling the advent in China of a female Maitreya, the Future Buddha. The empress was delighted – it could only refer to her – and adopted ‘Peerless Maitreya’ as one of her titles. She was less delighted by the abbot’s monks running riot in Luoyang and by his presumption and all-consuming jealousy. In 695 he apparently took leave of his senses and burned down the empress’s newly built Mingtang (a colossal ceremonial hall). Days later, he was found murdered. Liabilities, like enemies, could expect no mercy from Wu Zetian.
‘With his death, the attitude of the empress towards Buddhism seems to have changed,’ notes Richard Guisso in The Cambridge History of China. 12 So did her attitude towards the succession. In 697 she abandoned the pretence of founding her own Zhou dynasty and recalled Tang Zhongzong (one of her bit-part sons by Tang Gaozong) as heir apparent. The risk of her reputation being relegated to an intercalary dynasty was eliminated, and a Tang restoration looked certain. But it was not this which finally undermined the authority of the now eighty-something empress, rather a deadly mix of vanity and senescence. The sources insist that she was well preserved for her age and that a heavy dependence on aphrodisiacs had resulted in her sprouting fashionably bushy eyebrows and a fine new set of teeth. These doubtful achievements are offered by way of explanation for her welcoming into her confidence, and very possibly her bed (for by now she rarely left it), two young and feckless dandies, both called Zhang (they were half-brothers); she indulged their every whim and would have no word said against them.
The Zhangs, like the abbot, took full advantage of her favour. Bureaucrats and Buddhists alike were scandalised by their orgies. Wu supporters joined Tang supporters, their deadly enemies, in detestation of the pair. But the empress stood by her protégés and mustered all her failing energies in repeatedly rescuing them from the courts. No one thought to mention that equally dissolute conduct in a besotted old emperor would have passed unnoticed. Then, in early 705, one too many imperial pardons for Zhang crimes tipped the scales. With the empress clearly ailing, a group of outraged senior statesmen rallied troops, coaxed the heir apparent Zhongzong from his chambers and entered the Chang’an palace. The Zhangs were confronted and executed on the spot. Only a dishevelled and unsteady empress barred the path. ‘Rapidly comprehending the situation,’ writes Guisso, ‘she addressed her trembling son [Zhongzong] and the other plotters in terms of contempt. Then, her half century of power at an end, she returned to bed.’13
She died later the same year. In the words used of Tang Taizong’s golden age, there had been ‘nothing quite like her since antiquity’.
As noted, the histories gloss over Wu Zetian’s personal role in directing the wider business of the empire. Yet, on their own admission, and despite Tang Gaozong’s delaying his death until 683, it would seem that as of 655 ‘government proceeded from her alone’ and as of 664 ‘all the great powers of the empire devolved on the empress’.14 With or without her ailing and possibly epileptic husband, therefore, and despite the historians’ reticence, the empress must be held ultimately responsible for all transactions during her five decades of ascendancy.
Economics were evidently her weakest suit; they were for most emperors. The tax base had mysteriously contracted from Sui Wendi’s 606 figure of nearly 9 million registered households to Tang Taizong’s 640s figure of under 3 million. It is presumed that this was the result of laxity in registration, further population movement and widespread exemptions, rather than some demographic catastrophe. Tax receipts were therefore inadequate for the lavish expenditure dictated by the empress’s penchant for bureaucratic proliferation, dynastic extravaganzas and devotional endowments, let alone the defence of the empire. Yet the normal expedient of tinkering with the currency seemed only to make things worse. Minti
ng less coin, then devaluing the existing stock and reducing its copper content, encouraged counterfeiting, which was easy to outlaw but hard to eliminate. The Han salt monopoly had long since ceased to be dependable; other sources of revenue were barely explored, the one exception being a patently desperate scheme to sell manure from the imperial stables.
Inflation became a feature of the period. Grain prices on the open market reportedly rose by a hundredfold from ‘the three or four cash per peck’ of Tang Taizong’s halcyon days. On the other hand, the great granaries and the canal system seem to have served their purpose of subsidising the needy in such times of stress and relieving the worst cases of famine. Agrarian protest was notably muted; indeed, ‘among the people, the empress may even have been popular’, suggests Guisso.15
Perhaps of necessity given the short shrift shown to intransigent officials, she was more successful in increasing the supply of scholars qualified for office. A few outsiders – sharp-witted women as well as plausible young men – found rapid advancement courtesy of her personal favour. Otherwise she followed the example of her Sui and Tang predecessors by opening up the education system, increasing the number of examinees and refining the actual examinations. She also established a group of scholars within the palace which eventually became the famous Hanlin academy. Recruits from hereditary office-holding families still dominated the bureaucratic intake, though more of them now sat the examinations and brought to their work a level of intellectual proficiency. Examination candidates from outside these charmed circles, and especially from the minor aristocracy in the provinces, had less chance of office. But their gravitation towards court and capital furthered the cause of national integration and would add to the intellectual lustre of the age. From this pool of aspiring but often frustrated talent would rise some of the best-loved Tang poets, musicians and artists.
THE GREATEST POWER IN ASIA
To one so necessarily preoccupied with maintaining her own position, tributary relations and military deployments could have been a distraction. Yet Wu Zetian was conscious of their importance to her legitimacy and far from neglectful; indeed, her half-century of managing the Chinese empire at its greatest but most vulnerable extent may constitute one of her most neglected achievements. In earlier times Han Wudi’s inner Asian empire had vanished into the desert within a matter of decades; but thanks in no small part to the empress, Tang Taizong’s would flourish for well over a century, opening up new perspectives for both the Middle Kingdom and its tribute-bearing satellites, while setting a benchmark against which subsequent Chinese dynasties, and then republics, would measure their success.
Heaven’s Sons – and Daughters – needed to look no further than the Mandate for the moral right to regulate the affairs of ‘All-under-Heaven’. The reverential relationships and tributary terms of such an imperium were by now well rehearsed and its structure generally understood as a concentric arrangement in which close subordination shaded into distant dependency. Like cartographic contours, the levels of submission rippled outwards from the emperor through the tightly controlled inner rings of the palace, the capital and the metropolitan hinterland, to the provinces, the frontier command areas, the vassal chiefs and tribes beyond, and so to the farthest-flung states on Heaven’s tribute-tendering horizon.
Only the methodology and the means for enforcing this ambitious arrangement left something to be desired. Confucian doctrine, formulated during the ‘Warring States’ era and partly in reaction to it, was adamant about civilian control over military affairs. It was one of the features that distinguished China’s culture from that of its nomadic neighbours. Though expansive and often downright aggressive, at few moments in history could the Chinese empire be characterised as militaristic. Military matters were traditionally treated as a subordinate function of the bureaucracy; under no circumstances should the bureaucracy become a subordinate function of the military. Theoretically, standing armies were anathema, professional soldiers parasites. Troops, whether conscripts or fubing (territorial militias), should be farmers-on-horseback and peasants-with-crossbows; generals should be, and usually were, bureaucrats-in-uniform. They were commissioned for a single campaign and, unless reappointed, reverted to civilian life after it. With military success offering a short cut to the highest office, a term disparaging an upstart as one who ‘went out a general and came in a chancellor’ (chu jiang ru xiang) gained wide currency.16
Military manoeuvres were ideally held during the slack season of the agricultural year, campaigns were kept to a matter of months, and expeditions were launched on a there-and-back basis with objectives clearly specified and minimal discretion allowed to the commander in the field. According to the Sunzi, the classic text on warfare of perhaps the fourth century BC, armies constituted ‘a way of deception’. Their well-drilled presence should serve to coerce and deter, but their actual use was to be discouraged. Far better to inveigle others into a multi-partite alliance and get them to do any fighting; hence the cliché, as old as China’s history, of ‘using barbarians to control barbarians’. For just as war, being notoriously unpredictable, was to be considered a last resort, so battle was to be offered only when victory was guaranteed. Indeed, if war represented a failure of diplomacy, then deployment represented a failure of strategy, and battle a failure of tactics.
It was not a question of ‘Confucian passivity’, nor, though the peoples of the steppe often interpreted it that way, of a sedentary and agrarian lifestyle being inimical to martial prowess. In his youth, the future Tang Taizong had been the very model of a warrior-prince and, latterly against Koguryo, one of the few emperors to accompany his troops into battle. Military discipline was strict, and when action was deemed necessary, vast imperial armies took the field and often inflicted colossal casualties. Given the ‘All-under-Heaven’ nature of the Mandate, any peoples in breach or ignorance of their obligations to the emperor were considered miscreants who must be induced to submit or be punished. In this sense, war was a corrective, an extension of the penal code from the recalcitrant individual (and his supposedly complicit family) to all those who dared defy the Heaven-ordained ruler, whether from within the frontier as ‘bandits’ (that is rebels) or from outside it as ‘barbarians’ (that is aliens).
In ancient times the carrot-and-stick of conventional strategy had worked well in cowing indigenous peoples like the Di, the Rong and the Man. Likewise the tribute-for-trade and peace-through-kinship compromises with the Xiongnu, Xianbei and Qiang had blunted the threat posed by the nomadic and generally unstable tribal confederations of the steppe. But as of the seventh century, the empire found itself confronted by more formidable foes – Turkic, Tibetan, Korean and Khitan – with their own cultural identities and political institutions, and with sedentary or semi-sedentarised populations at some remove from the Middle Kingdom.
Following the seven disastrous invasions of Korea by the Sui emperors and Tang Taizong, Wu Zetian’s 668 conquest of Koguryo smacked somewhat of face-saving. The Han empire’s Korean appendage had finally been reclaimed; protectorates were established in the peninsula; and of its three kingdoms, only that of Silla was left standing. But from an ally, Silla soon turned into a focus for resistance and then, with some Japanese assistance, into a determined enemy. As one imperial official had anticipated, ‘[The] dilemma was that, if the number of troops [sent to Korea] was small, China would be unable to exert enough force to retain control, but if the number was large, China would be exhausted trying to supply that force.’17 Korea was not a steppe-land from which the enemy could simply be driven off. Its proud and bounteous kingdoms proved as costly to hold as they had been to take. Some Koreans found service in the imperial forces, while large numbers of Koguryo’s farmers were transplanted west of the Yalu River into Manchuria and Hebei. But by 672 a process of Chinese retraction from the peninsula (Korean sources imply expulsion) was already under way. It culminated in the evacuation of Pyongyang in 676. Korea was not destined to form an integral part of the Ch
inese empire. Substantially reunited by Silla, it would acknowledge Tang suzerainty but retain full autonomy until, like China itself, it was overrun by the Mongols in the thirteenth century.
The empress had to console herself with a short-lived victory and a net territorial gain in what is now Liaoning province. As the protectorate of Andong (later Pinglu), this foothold in Manchuria with its residual claims on Korean allegiance and that of various Manchurian peoples would be echoed in the extreme south, where a protectorate based on what is now northern Vietnam continued to exercise tenuous claims over the adjacent kingdoms of south-east Asia. Both typified the adjustments, military and administrative, that characterised the organisation of the vastly extended Tang empire under Wu Zetian.
Of India in the eighteenth century it would be said that it ‘fell into Britannia’s lap while she was sleeping’. Less dozy, Tang Taizong had patiently positioned himself beneath the Turk qaghanates and then in the late 630s shaken their easternmost branch with a lunge into Mongolia and well-directed prods at the oasis-cities along the silk routes. But ultimately in Turkic Asia, as in Mughal India, the plums had fallen ripely, one dislodging others, with no laborious picking. Known as the On Oq (the ‘Ten Arrows’, or tribes), the various Turkic-speaking peoples who had comprised the Western Turk qaghanate succumbed in similar fashion during the 640s to fratricidal strife exacerbated by what one of their inscriptions describes as ‘the cunning and deceitfulness of the Chinese’; ‘the sons of the nobles became slaves of the Chinese’, it bemoans, ‘and their lady-like daughters became servants’.18 While the On Oq squabbled, their subject territories – rich city-states and any intervening pasturelands – had been gathered in and their allegiance transferred to the Heavenly qaghanate.