Even though there were already lethal divisions in the Muhammad family, soon to break out into war, Commander Omar was not finished. Heraclius died in 641, and it could only be a matter of time before Constantinople too fell, but first Omar sent more troops to catch Shah Yazdgard, who was chased, now alone and abandoned, to a remote mill near Merv (Turkmenistan), where he spent the night in a heap of straw until the mill owner returned and killed him, tossing him into the pond. But the last of the Sassanian shahs had a final idea that could change everything: he dispatched his son Peroz to call in the Chinese.*
The next half-century of Chinese power belonged to women.
In 637, as Arab armies swept into eastern Persia and northern Africa, Emperor Taizong lost his beloved wife. To cheer up the emperor, the Inner Palace eunuchs recruited new concubines. Taizong noticed the ‘enticing beauty’ of a fourteen-year-old girl, who was the well-educated daughter of a Tang official and merchant, related through her mother to the recent emperors. Nicknaming her the ‘enchanting Miss Wu’, Taizong enrolled her as a concubine of the sixth rank, a talent.* When Wu’s mother burst into tears, the precocious daughter replied, ‘How could looking upon the Son of Heaven be anything but a blessing! Why weep like a child?’ Sexual magnetism, fearless intelligence, cultured wit and a sense of adventure may have made her unusual in the Inner Court, where a strict hierarchy could be overturned by a beguiling glance. There, Wu was educated by eunuchs and learned the arts of cosmetics – eyebrows were plucked and embellished with ‘moth antennae’, cinnabar gloss applied to lips, faced whitened with lead oxide.
The emperor rarely visited, but one day when she was attending him, Wu cleverly engaged him on his favourite subject. ‘Emperor Taizong had a horse named Lion Stallion,’ she remembered later, ‘who was so big and powerful that no one could mount him.’ She offered to break in Lion Stallion. ‘I only need three things to break him,’ she said. ‘An iron whip, an iron hammer and a sharp dagger. I will whip him with the whip. If he doesn’t submit, I’ll hit his head with the hammer. If he still doesn’t submit, I’ll cut his throat with the dagger.’
‘Do you really believe,’ replied Taizong suggestively, praising her boldness, ‘that you’re qualified to stain my dagger?’ This was probably when the emperor had sex with her, but by the early 640s he was struggling with bad health and insubordinate sons. The crown prince turned out to be mad, two more princes planned to assassinate him; as heir Taizong chose his reticent ninth son, Li Zhi, the future Gaozong. Seeking diversion in a disastrous campaign to conquer Korea, Taizong found power draining away. His hair turning white with the strain, Gaozong sat by Taizong’s bed while Wu waited on the crown prince, four years her junior, who was increasingly attracted to her. But it was a sensitive situation since technically she was a stepmother and any liaison incestuous. Nonetheless they started an affair.
ENCHANTING WU: THE EMPRESS KILLED MY BABY
In 649, Taizong died at the age of fifty-one. Young Emperor Gaozong sent all his father’s girls to the Buddhist convent for ‘purification’, their heads shaven and wearing sackcloth, before they would emerge for marriage and normal life. After a year Gaozong visited them to honour his father and saw Wu. The chemistry was reactivated, and both of them started to weep. He allowed her to grow her hair while she wrote a sensuous poem that encouraged his frequent visits:
I look upon your disc of jade and my thoughts scatter in disarray
As haggard from grief sundered and separate I so keenly miss my Sovereign.
If you don’t believe this endless litany of tears
Then open my chest and examine my tear-stained pomegranate red dress.
Gaozong was married to Empress Wang, who made the mistake of encouraging his passion to distract him from another mistress, Consort Xiao. But, as so often, the cure was lethal. Moving back into the Inner Palace, Wu dazzled the emperor and charmed the maids, eunuchs and concubines who became her devoted agents, while the anxious Empress Wang, who was childless, adopted another girl’s son to appoint as crown prince, hoping to stop the rise of this gorgeous upstart. After a son, Wu had a daughter whom the empress liked to dandle on her knee. In 654, the empress played with the baby; when she left, Wu suffocated her own daughter and then, when the emperor visited, she revealed in an agony of grief the blue-faced child, blaming Empress Wang. Gaozong questioned the staff, all of whom replied that ‘the Empress’ was responsible. Gaozong cried, ‘The Empress has murdered my baby!’ Wu’s career was recorded after her death by hostile historians, but even if she did not murder her own daughter, she used the death to destroy Gaozong’s relationship with his wife, whose barrenness was a tragedy in a dynastic court when her rival would deliver six children.
