Empress Wang resorted to magic to get pregnant, which allowed Wu, informed by her spies, to accuse the wife of illegal witchcraft. Gaozong proposed to divorce Wang and marry Wu, a move that was opposed by veteran ministers who cited her intimacy with the dead emperor. But in 655 Empress Wang and Consort Xiao were both found guilty of sorcery and imprisoned in a turret. Wu, now thirty-one, became empress consort and her eldest son Li Hong was appointed crown prince. But one day, passing the tower where his ex-wife and ex-consort were imprisoned, Gaozong was touched by their cries. This provoked Wu to have them flogged, dismembered alive then drowned in a flagon of wine with the words, ‘Now you crones can get drunk to your marrow!’
Gaozong was devoted to Wu, who gave birth to a last daughter, the Taiping Princess, at the age of forty. While always protecting her power with ingenious energy and seeking to destroy her enemies, never forgetting a slight, she ruled in partnership with the emperor, who appreciated her acumen. Wu’s power reflected the way forms of family shaped east and central Asia: women among nomadic peoples enjoyed more freedom and authority than those in sedentary states. Yet no emperor, especially not Gaozong, could fill the gap left by Taizong and the couple struggled to hold the empire together.
Gaozong suffered a stroke early in his long reign, but he recovered and Wu shared much of the work with him – they were nicknamed the Two Sages. She refused to promote her own family, helping to organize a campaign against Korea, another to defeat the Turks, initiating the use of meritocratic examinations for the civil service, fostering a bureaucracy controlled by the monarch rather than a hereditary elite and arranging the complex ritual spectacular of the Feng and Shan sacrifices at Mount Tai. They celebrated their double act by adopting the Taoist titles of Celestial Emperor and Empress. Wu revered Buddhism and Taoism, though she was, like everyone at that time, extremely superstitious. Her patronage of a magician was denounced to the emperor by a eunuch. Gaozong consulted his veteran chancellor Shangguan Yi, who advised, ‘The empress has no control of herself, and the entire empire is dissatisfied with her. Please depose her.’ Gaozong was about to sign this edict when the empress’s spies informed her and she arrived just in time. The emperor blamed Shangguan Yi, who, accused by the empress of planning to assassinate Gaozong, was then executed together with his son. Yet much later the chancellor’s granddaughter would play a special role with Wu.
Wu understood her husband’s sexual appetites. She first imported her widowed sister as mistress (the emperor nicknamed her Beauty of State and she bore him a son); then on her death, the sister’s daughter, Wu’s niece the Lady of Wei became imperial paramour – too successfully. Ever vigilant, Wu had her niece poisoned.
After the crown prince died of tuberculosis (some historians claim Wu killed him too), Gaozong promoted their son, Li Xian. But here there was a problem. As the emperor weakened, Li Xian planned to remove his mother from power. The coldness between them became icier. The boy had discovered a secret. He was not really her son at all but her late sister’s bastard, born in secret then adopted by her. The emperor did not improve matters when he announced that his wife and son would be joint heirs. The couple consulted a mystic who warned that Xian was unsuitable. Xian heard this and had the mystic murdered. He was duly exiled and his brother Li Zhe became crown prince in his stead. With famines, earthquakes and epidemics suggesting that the Mandate of Heaven was in doubt, Gaozong deteriorated, dying in 683. As Wu laid her plans, they received reports from Syria of a new monarch named Mo-yi: the opening of the age of Arab dynasties.
* Around 650, the greatest city in the Americas, Teotihuacan, was systematically burned in a revolution of the ordinary people. It was not a foreign invasion: invaders usually destroy homes and the infrastructure of ordinary people but keep the monuments. Here it was the opposite: palaces and temples were burned. In the resulting vacuum, the much smaller city of Tula, capital of the Toltecs, and the Maya cities in Yucatán continued to thrive.
* The first evidence of the fusion of Indic and Chinese culture, mixed with Persian Zoroastrianism, is found in the beautiful and colourful frescoes of the Kizil Caves at Turfan in Xinjiang, dated between 300 and 400.
* In the Tarim Basin, today’s Xinjiang, Taizong conquered the Tocharian peoples, who had partly intermarried with the Uighurs, but live for us vividly because of the love poems they left behind. ‘A thousand years, you will tell our story,’ reads one. ‘There was no human dearer to me than you and likewise hereafter there’ll be no one dearer to you than me. Your love, your affection, my jubilant song rises up. I will live with one love for the whole of my life …’
