When his regular visits led her ministers to suggest archly that he should be castrated, she ordered instead that Master Xue should be tonsured as a Buddhist monk and promoted him to abbot of the White Horse Monastery.
Brusque, colourful and arrogant, the Master soon wielded immense power, escorted by ten eunuchs and a posse of heavies. Wu’s image as a power-mad ageing nymphomaniac was unfair, given the hundreds of young concubines enjoyed by male emperors, and her well-hung youth did perform a mystical seminal rite: Taoists believed that the life essence – semen – of a young man rejuvenated his older lover. Yet the Master had other talents too, as organizer and architect. He advised Wu on religion, and together they endorsed Buddhism, its otherworldliness and emotional equanimity complementing the dutiful ethics of Confucius and the mystical rites of Tao. She built pagodas, welcomed Buddhist sages and ordered the compilation of sacred text,
She sponsored talent wherever she found it, once jokingly upbraiding her ministers for persecuting a critic who had dared to attack her: ‘How could you waste such a gifted person?’ The most surprising of her advisers – and probably the most talented – was her young, beautiful female secretary, Shangguan Wan’er, whose father and grandfather had been executed by Wu for trying to get the empress consort dismissed; the child was then enslaved. But she was a brilliant poet; Wu saw the poems and hired her. Shangguan Wan’er thereafter wrote her decrees, but when she was caught disobeying an order, the empress had her face tattooed. The enslaved, manumitted, branded amanuensis became a potentate in this unusually feminine regime.
In 690, Wu secretly orchestrated popular demonstrations and auspicious omens demanding she become empress regnant. Finally she agreed and forced her son Li Dan to retire and, assuming the dynasty name of Zhou, she became the first empress regnant, donning the yellow robes of a Huang-di (emperor) – but this made her even more ferociously vigilant. When two ministers made the mistake of visiting the ex-emperor Dan, she had them sliced in half. In 693, she murdered Dan’s wife and consort.* When he met his mother, Dan carefully pretended nothing had happened.
In 694, Wu wearied of the Master, taking her doctor as a new lover. The spurned Master burned down the Heavenly Hall, his jealousy flattering her. She promoted him to duke and had him rebuild it, but there is nothing as dead as dead love and his tantrums angered her. So he was beaten to death and incinerated, the ashes stirred into mud.
By now, she had successfully repelled and outmanoeuvred Tibetans, Koreans and Turks, adding a million non-Chinese to her empire, receiving tribute-bearing embassies from Japan, India and central Asia, victories that justified her Mandate of Heaven. She felt confident enough to reduce the terror. Her hated torturer Lai, enriched by bribes and insatiable for sexual favours from terrified families, overreached by denouncing Wu’s daughter the Taiping Princess. As he was about to be publicly sliced, the mob went berserk, tearing out his heart and trampling him to pulp.
Wu was now in her seventies, maintaining her beauty with cosmetics. She also resorted to Taoist charlatans, appointing as chancellor one who claimed to be 400 years old, though she soon forced him to commit suicide.
In 697, the Taiping Princess, who resembled Wu herself, recommended a new lover for her mother. Beautiful, young and a fine singer, Zhang Changzong was one of five ambitious brothers. The empress was enraptured by him, and he introduced his brother Zhang Yizhi as even more adept in bed. Flashy, effeminate and arrogant, ‘the Boys’ – as she called them – wore vermilion robes and held outrageous parties at court. Wu was dazzled by them, creating for them a literary power base known as the Reigning Storks Institution – storks being the traditional conveyance for Taoist fairies – reflecting her new belief that Zhang Changzong was a stork-riding Taoist immortal and she herself Queen Mother of the West who hoped that the Boys’ semen, male yang essence, would rejuvenate her.
