THOUGH EMPERORS WERE NEITHER SUBJECT TO any form of law nor accountable to anything in the nature of a representative body, they were not therefore beyond all restraint. The Mandate might be forfeited if they abused it; more immediately, ministers could offer objections and criticism. ‘If it is not right, remonstrate,’ Confucius had told one of his office-seeking disciples. In the Confucian scheme of things, strict obedience to one’s betters by no means precluded constructive protest. On the contrary, confronted by injustice, ‘the son cannot but remonstrate with his father’, said the Master, ‘and the minister cannot but remonstrate with his prince’.1
The exercise of absolute power being peculiarly liable to abuse, Confucian tradition required ministers and advisers to be vigilant and to give voice to their misgivings, albeit in allusive language larded with respectful sentiments and laced with historical references. It was not just their right to do so but their moral duty. Serving the emperor meant dissuading him from conduct that might alienate his subjects or otherwise jeopardise his enjoyment of the Mandate. Corrective advice was thus a moral obligation enshrined in the responsibilities of office. Whatever the risks – and they could be fatal – those charged with the role of remonstrance were expected to exercise it. And just as fearless reproof distinguished the greatest ministers, so a receptive disposition was the mark of a truly great emperor.
Tang Taizong’s thirty-two-year reign was notable for the establishment of one of the empire’s longest-lasting dynasties and for a dramatic extension of its frontiers, but no less important – in fact the clearest evidence of the moral rectitude that made these achievements possible – was the forbearance initially shown by the emperor towards his badgering ministers. Of these, not the most powerful but certainly the most persistent was a cantankerous old office-holder with a chequered history called Wei Zheng. Twenty years the emperor’s senior, abstemious, humourless, ultra-cautious, partially blind and infuriatingly doctrinaire, Wei Zheng typified the Confucian bureaucrat. In an age more notable for entrenched privilege, he represented the ideal of high moral and intellectual worth triumphing over hereditary influence; and as such, as a beacon of rectitude, a barrier to indulgence, a stickler for etiquette, and the doughtiest of remonstrants, he would become a model to future generations.
After Wei Zheng’s death in 643, the emperor revered him as ‘a sturdy bamboo touched by frost’, the reference being to his crusty temperament as much as his age. In Monkey, the sixteenth-century novel based on Xuanzang’s travels, Wei Zheng is portrayed as a vigilant martinet who gets to guard the door of Taizong’s bedchamber. Indeed, his effigy is said to play this role still at the entrances to some Taiwanese temples.2 But in the People’s Republic of China there would be no place for a figure so closely associated with legitimate protest. Ostensibly for republishing a standard eleventh-century biography of Wei Zheng, in 1966 Lu Dingyi, the then minister of culture, member of the Communist Party’s Central Committee and director of its Propaganda Department, was disgraced and removed from office. ‘It is now clear’, intoned the People’s Daily, ‘that Lu Dingyi’s concoction “The Biography of Wei Zheng” was a poisonous shaft directed at Chairman Mao, the red sun in our hearts; it was a manifesto for stirring up a counter-revolutionary restoration.’3 According to the newspaper, the relationship between Wei Zheng and Tang Taizong had been a sham; both ruthlessly exploited the peasants; they differed only as to the means; their altercations were therefore irrelevant, and publicising them could only be mischievous.
This was a bit unfair on Wei Zheng, who had often cited the welfare of the people when endeavouring to restrain his headstrong emperor. But such niceties went unnoticed in the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. The perils that attended the reissue of an eleventh-century text typified the constraints under which historical scholarship in the twentieth century long laboured. Criticism, admonition and reproof, though obligatory in a minister of the emperor’s ‘feudal regime’, could be revisionist heresy in a minister of the People’s Republic.
In reality Tang Taizong often ignored Wei Zheng’s criticisms. He particularly resented the bureaucrat’s insistence on frugality, fiscal restraint and the avoidance of war; wuwei (‘inaction’) was not in his nature. Their relationship eventually deteriorated and in the late 630s, as the emperor assumed the offensive against the Eastern Turks in Xinjiang, Wei Zheng lost some of his influence. Yet he kept his official rank, most of his offices and the emperor’s avowed esteem. It was a tribute to them both.
It also helps explain why Tang Taizong, despite deposing his father, murdering his brothers and waging a disastrous war on Koguryo, would receive highly favourable treatment from Wei Zheng’s Confucian colleagues and successors when they came to compile the Standard History of his reign. According to one of them, Tang Taizong’s reign rated as a halcyon age. His subjects basked amid plenty in as peaceful a realm as the conventional hyperbole reserved for such eulogies could depict.
Merchants travelling in the wilderness were never again robbed by bandits. The prisons were usually empty. Horses and cows roamed the open country. Gates went unlocked. Repeatedly there were abundant harvests and the price of grain fell to three or four copper cash per peck. Travelling [even to the extremities of the country] . . . no one had to carry provisions but could obtain them on the way . . . There has been nothing like this since antiquity.4
Nor was this generous assessment without substance. Tang Taizong faced less opposition and therefore had less need of prisons than either of the Sui emperors or his father; and harvests do seem to have been plentiful. The granaries filled, famine relief was available, and destitution-driven banditry declined, making travel less hazardous. While the economy was recovering, labour-intensive projects were shelved. Like Sui Wendi, Taizong pruned back the root and branch of the administration, reorganised the provinces and took special care in the selection of office-holders; for ready reference, he claimed to have had the names and records of all candidates for office painted on sheets of paper that were pasted to the walls of his chambers, like Post-its. He reorganised the fubingmilitias, embarked on a new legal codification that was again supposed to be more lenient and rational than its predecessors, and endeavoured to curb the social influence exercised by a coterie of powerful clans whose pedigrees eclipsed that of the Tang’s Li clan.
Acutely conscious of his place in history as well as society, he also turned his attention to the historiographical process. Over the previous centuries of the ‘Period of Disunion’, dynasties had come and gone so quickly that the work of compiling Standard Histories for each had fallen behind. To eliminate this backlog, Taizong set up the first Bureau of Historiography with Wei Zheng as one of those at the helm. Dynastic histories – of the Northern Qi, Northern Zhou and Sui, and of the Jin, Liang and Chen from the Six (southern) Dynasties – were soon pouring from the bureau’s massed brushes. Earlier works, such as the Shiji and the Hanshu, had been compiled privately by individuals or families who had received imperial endorsement only in the course of compilation or afterwards. But the new bureau made history-writing an official and ongoing undertaking. Culled from whatever records were available, cross-checked and counter-checked, the work became more formulaic and, as is the way with collaborative endeavours, less revealing.
Simultaneously, the bureau began the collection and editing of materials that could be used as a basis for the history of the Tang. Again the procedure was carefully regulated, with court circulars and reports being distilled into yearly calendars, the calendars into the reign-by-reign ‘veritable records’, and the veritable records into the dynasty’s ‘Standard History’. Theoretically the emperor had no say in the process; objectivity was supposedly paramount. Yet, over the howls of bureaucratic protest, Taizong demanded sight of early drafts and, confounding precedent, bullied his scribes into rewriting the murky events surrounding his accession.
Whether the favourable gloss put on the rest of his reign owes anything to imperial interference is less clear. Extrapolating from the Standard Histories, one twentieth-century admirer would be moved to describe Tang Taizong as ‘the man of destiny to whom no task seemed impossible, the saviour of society, the restorer of unity and peace’ whose personality was ‘so dynamic . . . that he became a legend with posterity [and] has had no equal on the throne of China’.5 Taizong would have settled for this; but he can scarcely have formulated it. The Standard History of his reign was not completed until seven years after his death and that of his dynasty not till very much later. Other reasons prompted the Bureau of Historiography to portray him as a towering figure, most notably the need to diminish the stature of his de facto successor.
Designating Tang Taizong’s successor had run into trouble in the 630s when the bureaucratic establishment had been scandalised by his eldest son and presumed heir rejecting Han etiquette and adopting the ways of his steppe ancestors. The young prince cast aside his girdled gown and clogs in favour of the nomad’s tunic and boots, would speak (and be spoken to) only in a Turkic dialect, and took to living in a tent, cooking on a campfire and ‘slicing himself gobbets of boiled mutton with a sword’.6
No doubt the details were much exaggerated, but it would seem that the heir apparent disdained scholarship, hankered after the outdoor life and took his succession to the Heavenly Qaghanate more seriously than his succession to the Heavenly Mandate.
The situation erupted in 643 when the emperor had some of the prince’s less savoury companions executed. Other sons were then emboldened to enter the fray, and in a series of doubtful plots and counter-plots, the heir apparent was accused of planning fratricide. He was banished to Guizhou, where he died. An alternative candidate was also driven into exile; apparently he was rather too confident a scholar and so less likely to be amenable to remonstrating ministers. The succession was then settled on the ninth of Taizong’s fourteen sons, a compromise candidate who was young enough to be malleable and delicate enough to encourage doubts about his permanence. And there it remained, not without further challenges, nor deep misgivings on the part of Taizong, until the emperor’s death and the elevation of this unlikely contender as Tang Gaozong (r. 649–83).
Tang Gaozong reigned without much impact or conviction. For a weakling who soon became an invalid, his thirty-four-year occupation of the throne was an achievement in itself. He was followed by his sons, Zhongzong and Ruizong, both of whom were enthroned twice, though never for long; their comings and goings are of merely chronological interest and their influence was even less than their father’s. For throughout the half-century from 655 till 705 real power resided elsewhere, in fact in the capable if bloodstained hands of one who might have ranked among China’s most outstanding rulers but for the handicap of gender. This was Wu Zetian, the consort of Gaozong, mother of Zhongzong and Ruizong, and so empress, dowager empress and then, uniquely, for fifteen years (690–705) emperor (sic) in her own right.
In truth, more than her sex told against Wu Zetian. Being preceded by the revered Tang Taizong would have put any ruler at a disadvantage. Preserving his record of internal peace, maintaining his vastly increased empire and matching his example of responsive government were formidable challenges. Worse still for Wu Zetian’s prospects of posthumous applause, she would be followed – after Zhongzong and Ruizong had made their second curtain calls – by Tang Xuanzong, the dynasty’s roi soleil. Another colossus whose long and mostly glorious reign (715–56) would gild the heights of Tang civilisation, Xuanzong (not to be confused with the pilgrim Xuanzang) would set a dazzling example of humane government, exit the throne as a romantic hero, and be remembered as that rarity among China’s rulers, a popular emperor.
Sandwiched between a legendary paragon and a national treasure, a third contender for best-ever emperor would have been an embarrassment. In comparison with such giants, even a legitimately chosen, Heaven-favoured and decently whiskered descendant of Li Yuan (Tang Gaozu) would have struggled for historical recognition. Indeed Tang Gaozong’s pitiful showing rather proves the point. But Wu Zetian (or Wu Zhao, as she started off in life) enjoyed none of these advantages. As a usurper who eliminated more people called Li (in this case Tang family members) than had Sui Yangdi in response to the Peach-plum prophecy, she could expect no favours from compilers of the Tang dynastic histories. As a woman, a member of that half of humanity relegated to domestic subservience by Confucian orthodoxy and deeply distrusted by every history-conscious bureaucrat, she could count on neither contemporary support nor posterity’s sympathy. And as one who not only manipulated the succession but commandeered the throne and ruled in the most arbitrary and unreceptive of fashions, she was simply beyond the pale of dispassionate scholarship.
The result is a career chronicled exclusively by detractors. With policies excoriated and every disaster magnified, this could still be revealing. But in fact the histories credit the empress with little more than a catalogue of atrocities, scandalous liaisons and diabolical intrigues. ‘From the very first the historical record of her reign has been hostile, biased and curiously fragmentary and incomplete,’ note the contributors to The Cambridge History of China. ‘Less is known of her half century of dominance than of any comparable period of the Tang.’7 It is as if the annalists, denied the Heaven-sent catastrophes that should have attended her rule yet determined to discredit anything of a more positive nature, had had to fall back on personal invective, palace gossip and the always excruciating torments meted out to suspected opponents. The popular discontent to be expected of her lavish expenditure seems barely to have surfaced. Tang loyalists failed to muster other than a spluttering and ineffective resistance. For those bureaucrats who were eliminated or declined to serve, others just as capable were found. And external foes seeking to take advantage of a supposedly gender-impaired empire would be bitterly disappointed.
That Wu Zetian nursed ambitions and skills beyond the ordinary was conceded even by her detractors. Tang Taizong had taken her into his household as a thirteen-year-old concubine of junior rank, probably to honour her deceased father, who had been ennobled by Tang Gaozu. Her mother, a devout Buddhist, was related to the Sui but commanded no great following. She herself is said to have been ‘beautiful and enticing’.8 Whether or not Taizong was enticed, the future Tang Gaozong was. Their teenage affair may have begun before Taizong’s death and certainly blossomed soon after it, for by 654 she had given birth to at least one son by the now Tang Gaozong. Either way, because of her original selection by Taizong, their relationship counted as incest, a crime that Taizong’s legal code had reinstated as one of ‘the Ten Abominations’. Moreover Gaozong already had an empress, albeit without issue.
But obstacles that would have thwarted most power-seeking maids were as nothing to the ingenious and unscrupulous Wu Zhao. In 654, having given birth to a daughter, she is said to have encouraged Gaozong’s Empress Wang to play with the baby, and then, having suffocated it, to have convinced Gaozong that the empress, as the last in attendance, must be the murderess. Such, at least, is the explanation offered for the demotion and detention of Empress Wang and for the wholesale purge of all who had supported her, including many of the most respected ministers inherited from Tang Taizong’s reign. Within a year Wu Zhao herself was installed as empress with the title Wu Zetian and with her son as heir apparent. Tang Gaozong, possibly fooled but quite likely complicit, seems to have rejoiced in the outcome; the old guard of senior bureaucrats had been removed and replaced by more amenable and less well-connected figures who owed their positions entirely to the new dispensation.
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. Minting 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.