Wu Zhao (later honorific Wu Zetian, 624–705) entered the imperial harem of the Tang Emperor Taizong in 638 as a junior fifth-rank concubine, aged 14. She was reportedly literate (her family was minor military aristocracy from Shanxi, prosperous enough to educate daughters), which was unusual in a Tang concubine of that rank. Taizong used her as a secretary as well as a sexual partner.

When Taizong died in 649 the standard imperial procedure was to send all his childless concubines into a Buddhist nunnery for the rest of their lives. Wu was sent to Ganye Temple outside the capital Chang’an. She should not have been heard from again.

655

Taizong’s son Gaozong had become emperor in 649. Within a year of his father’s death he visited Ganye Temple ostensibly to mourn, encountered Wu, and arranged for her recall to the palace in 651. By 654 she had borne him two sons. By 655 she had displaced the existing Empress Wang in a court intrigue whose details (the Old Book of Tang says Wu murdered her own infant daughter and blamed Wang) are contested by modern scholars but were certainly believed at the time.

Wu was formally proclaimed empress consort on 27 November 655. Empress Wang and the senior concubine Xiao Liangdi were imprisoned, mutilated, and murdered.

Gaozong suffered a debilitating stroke in 660. From that point onward Wu ran the government. She formally received memorials, issued imperial edicts in her husband’s name, and conducted court audiences. Gaozong’s other sons by other consorts were removed from the line of succession one by one through the 670s — at least two were killed.

Gaozong died in December 683. Wu’s son Zhongzong succeeded as emperor; Wu deposed him after fifty-five days for showing political independence. Her second son Ruizong succeeded as titular emperor and was kept in seclusion in a side palace. Wu ruled in his name as regent for seven years.

690

In autumn 690 Wu accepted a series of carefully-orchestrated public petitions — by Buddhist clergy, by court officials, by representatives of the regional aristocracy — asking her to take the throne in her own name. She accepted. Ruizong was demoted to crown prince and given Wu’s surname. The Tang dynasty was formally ended; a new dynasty named Zhou (after the ancient Western Zhou, not the historical eastern Zhou) was proclaimed. Wu took the imperial title Shengshen Huangdi (“Sacred and Divine Emperor”).

She was 66 years old.

She was, and remains, the only woman in approximately 2,000 years of recorded Chinese imperial history to hold the title of Emperor (huangdi) in her own name. Other women had ruled as regents — the Empress Lü of the Han, the later Qing-era Empress Dowager Cixi — but as power-behind-the-throne figures. Wu took the throne itself.

What she did with it

Her fifteen-year personal reign expanded the Tang-era civil service examination system (the keju) — including the unprecedented admission of candidates from outside the hereditary aristocracy — and dramatically expanded Buddhist state patronage. She funded the carving of the Vairocana Buddha at the Longmen Grottoes (completed 675) whose features Buddhist tradition describes as modelled on her own. She established the precedent that imperial succession could be conducted through a state-recognised religious legitimacy structure rather than only through hereditary succession.

The reign also produced an internal secret police apparatus that executed approximately 1,000 senior officials whose loyalty Wu doubted. Modern Chinese historiography is divided on how to evaluate the balance.

February 705

In February 705 Wu, aged 80 and seriously ill, was the target of a palace coup organised by senior court officials and Buddhist clergy who wanted the dynasty restored to the Tang. The coup succeeded without significant bloodshed. Wu abdicated on 22 February in favour of her son Zhongzong (whom she had deposed twenty-one years earlier). The Zhou dynasty was abolished; the Tang was restored.

Wu died at the Shangyang Palace in Luoyang on 16 December 705, aged 81. She had left specific instructions for her tombstone at the joint imperial mausoleum at Qianling: it was to be blank. She wanted later generations to write her epitaph for her.

It remains blank.