182. The Lady Macbeth of China

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0:29Hello and welcome to Empire with me, Anita Arnand. And me, William Durimple. And we are doing our favourite thing, which is talking about characters covered in blood from head to toe from history. It's funny how often we seem to circle round to these characters. They are interesting though, aren't they? They are interesting. And Empress Wu Zetian is among the most interesting. So if you were listening to the last episode, you will know here is a woman of middle class origin who rises through the ranks. Grade five concubine, first of all, rising up. That's not good enough because, you know, who wants to clean the emperor's smelly sheets forever?

1:03and she catches the eye of the emperor's son before the emperor dies and then becomes his concubine, upgraded, grade two, under his watch. Then she challenges the power of the two most powerful women in the realm, that is the chief concubine who in turn hates the empress. The empress hates the chief concubine. She decides they both have to go and she does it in the most blood-curdling way. She has their hands and feet cut off. She may have strangled her own child at birth and blamed it on the pair of them and their witchery. Poor Empress has her father dug up and desecrated and her family executed.

1:39And then she too meets a grisly, grisly end. The chief concubine, I mean, I just love this fact so much, just screams her innocence right to the end and says, you know what? I'm going to come back as a cat in the many lives that we have, and you're going to be the mouse and I'm going to slash your throat. It's a brilliant image. proper Lady Macbeth style. Instead of saying out damn spot, she says out damn cats and bans cats from the palace completely just in case. And then moves palaces. This is an unequivocal historical fact that the court moves from Xi 'an to Luoyang. Right, so to Luoyang. And it's her guilt.

2:15This is a thousand years before Macbeth is written. We have an empress with blood on her hands who is seeing gory apparitions at night. Right, so she's haunted. So she can't live there anymore. and she is with the emperor who you said was expressing some degree of quite impotent and useless sorrow as his two favorite women are being dismembered and dunked into vats of wine. I mean, fat lot of use, your tears are, mate. But he then has a stroke, perhaps from all the stress. And tell us more about the stroke. What does it do to Wu Zetian's husband, the emperor? So the emperor, Gao Zhong, is this already, I mean, he's famously a rather weak character.

2:54He's not at all the kind of Superman that Tao Zong, his father, had been. And the suggestion in the sources is that he's under the foot of Wu Zetian. And then, mysteriously, he has this stroke. He complains of feeling dizzy and disoriented and retires to bed. And of course, who takes charge? It's Wu Zetian. And she begins to attend public audiences initially from behind a curtain. There's this nice little quote from a court historian of the period. From this event onwards, whenever the emperor attended to business, the empress then hung a curtain and listened behind it. There was no matter of government, great or small, which she did not hear.

3:38The whole power of the empire passed into her hands. Reward and punishment, life and death, she decided. The emperor just folded his hands and that is all. In the court and country, they were called the two sages. Wow. Okay. But the one little tiny little tantalizing thing that we mentioned is that she is a Buddhist. And this is not a Buddhist country because her father-in-law, stroke former whatever he was, whose sheets she was cleaning as a grade five. He was about to, we think, make China Buddhist, but he dies before he can. The weakling son doesn't do that. But for Wu Zetian to prevail, she needs her faith and her faithful to be behind her.

4:29And she's got Daoists and she's got those who follow, what do you call Confucian? I want to call them Confucianistas. What do you call people who follow? I think that's a very nice. Confucianistas. It's good, isn't it? I just thought of that. But she needs to deal with them. And that is what we're going to be talking about a lot, is how she remoulds China to her convenience. So this is where we go back to our old friend Xuanzang. Now, those of you who have been regular Empire listeners will remember the story of this extraordinary monk. He's one of the most famous figures in Chinese history. And in fact, we know more about this one man than we do about almost any other figure from the period, because not only did he write his own memoir of his journey to India and to bring these tantric Buddhist texts back from the University Library of Nalanda, but he also was the subject of a surviving, very detailed contemporary biography, which is published about five years after his death.

5:25So we have his own account and his pupil's account, and we know all about him. And this guy, who's been working all his life for the promotion of Buddhism does not hesitate to ally with this new rising star. Yeah, but most importantly, we know about him because he's Tripitaka in monkey magic. Can we not forget that in popular culture, this young monk has filtered into series that many of us listening to this will have grown up with. So that's who we're talking about. So he is joyful that he has got somebody who understands him, understands what he's offering to humanity, you know, that Buddhism is the way to enlightenment.

6:07He supports her, he tells everybody that she, does he say, does he pronounce her divine or does she do that to herself? He doesn't actually pronounce her divine, but he does provide the text that later figures will use to declare the Empress a goddess. It's interesting, I mean, this guy who, you know, we regard as this very saintly Buddhist figure clearly must have had some indication that Wu was not innocence and slightly murderous psycho. But he certainly from the biography of his pupil, Huli, comes into the palace and takes the opportunity to promote Buddhism. And what you're finding now, this is a period of huge cultural richness and vitality in Chinese history.

6:54It's regarded as one of the great golden ages of China. There's a huge amount of money because now there's enormous trade coming in and out, both maritime and over land. It's a very cosmopolitan world. Both Xi 'an and Luoyang are full of merchants, many particularly from Central Asia, the Sogdians. This is the age of the Sogdian traders. And you get a lot in Tang poetry about Sogdian dancing girls. Who are the Sogdians? We need to understand who the Sogdians are. They are, let's use Game of Thrones is our ballot again. It's a very Game of Thrones world, yeah. There are dragons. So are we talking about the merchants of Meereen?

7:29Are we talking about the Iron Bank of Essos? What are we talking about here? It's those two together. It's sort of a mixture of the two. The Sogdians are based in what's now Samarkand and Tashkent, and they are the intermediaries moving stuff backwards and forwards between China and Persia, and to some extent India. The Sogdians are also largely Buddhist at this point, so the Empress Wu is very keen to invite them into court. You get, at this point, the Empress Wu starting her enormous cultural patronage. And this is another very important part of Wu's legacy. She's not just a person who seizes absolute power.

8:05She's someone who patronizes an extraordinary number of monasteries and temples. She donates to the famous Buddhist pilgrimage, Sound of Mount Wutai in Shanxi, several monasteries, esoteric images. 150 huge monasteries, my friend. Yep. That's nothing to be sneezed at. Nothing to be sneezed at. And what she also does, there is a series of Buddhist caves just outside the capital at a place called Longmen. And she not only gives huge amounts of money for these to be excavated, for Buddhist temples to fill the mountainside. There is this image of the Supreme Lord, Vairukana Buddha, who was unknown in China until Xuanzang brings back this incarnation of the Buddha from Nolanda and puts him center stage.

8:55And there's this image at the center of Longmen of this enormous face of Vairukana Buddha. And art historians have long noticed that it has rather feminine features. And there's a theory that this is the face of the Empress Wu. She has herself sculpted as the all-powerful Buddha in this cave complex. Now, again, it's important to remember that this is not just a spiritual imperative to have these monasteries, these huge monasteries set up. Because as we learned last time we spoke of this, William, monasteries were great centers of commerce. They were moneylenders. They sold goods. They sold wares.

9:31They were trading centers. So if you create these little hubs that are going to be richer than creases at the end of the day because they have monopolies on what comes in and what goes out. They export their Buddhism on the back of truckloads of precious metals and goods that are sought after elsewhere. What she's building up is a nice little power base, which has a cash flow. Exactly that. And she's spending a lot of the money. In Longmen, she excavates 380 vast, larger-than-life-size images around these cave temples. At the same time, she's pouring money into Xuanzang's translation project. And he now has an enormous sort of university full of copyists, scribes, translators, and they're going through this enormous pile of manuscripts that Xuanzang has brought back from India.

10:24And in 10 years in her reign between 660 and 670, Xuanzang and his enormous team translate no fewer than 670 scrolls from Nalanda, often very complex stuff, including the most famous of all, the Great Perfection of Wisdom Sutra, which is one of the sort of classic texts of Mahayana Buddhism. While the monk is busy and the monk is happy translating all of his wisdom, because he's doing it from a religious perspective, he wants people to have this knowledge that he traveled from one corner, as far as he's concerned, of the earth to the other, to go and collect it from India and bring it back. What's the emperor doing?

11:03Because he's had a stroke. Is he just in bed the whole time while she's doing all these things? At this point, he's fading away. And again, of course, there is gossip going around that she's putting something in his tea or spiking his food because he's becoming less and less coherent. He's spending longer and longer in bed and she's taking over. So is it at that point that she decides that she needs a title to match the power that she's, or the flex that she's flexing. So does she give herself the name Heavenly Empress? She, I think, is given it allegedly by him, but now, you know, people are seeing less and less of him around.

11:37So she's upgrading herself and Xuanzang is thrilled by this, but he now is very old. And we have this lovely description of the last days of Xuanzang, triumphant. He's gone to India. He's brought back all this stuff. Most of it is now translated. The Empress has enlarged and refurbished the library, which is built for his translations, which is still there in Xi 'an today, the Wild Goose Pagoda, which rises up with this fantastic pagoda that towers still over Xi 'an. And in his 70s, Xuanzang has a fall. He trips over a drainage ditch, I think going to the loo in the night like an old man. He has this final period and he lays down his calligraphy brush, determined while he still could, he writes, to practice meditation, to clarify my mind and still its waves.

12:35And this is a sentence I really love, to control the untamed ape of my emotions and restrain the charging elephant of my will. Lovely. It's beautiful, isn't it? So he has, in his life, translated 1 ,300 Buddhist scrolls. He puts down his brush. He makes a last sermon exhorting his followers, and this is important for what's going to come, to pray to the Bodhisattva Matriya, particularly the Bodhisattva Matriya, and to submit to his protection. And he makes a final confession. He vows to be reborn in Tussata heaven, and then he gives away all his robes and all his possessions. He dies soon after midnight on the 5th of September, 664, and his disciples report seeing four fiery auroras shooting across the stars at the moment of his death.

13:29Knowing that the greatest proponent of Buddhism has faded and disappeared, the Empress decides to make a very political decision, which is to put Buddhism, the religion that he embodied, and an equal footing with the Taoists. Now, that is quite something, isn't it? It's never happened before in Chinese history. This is completely new. It's revolutionary. And of course, there's huge grumblings in the palace. Yeah, how dare you? This is just a new thing. What is this new fad that you're suddenly putting on an equal footing with us? The Empress needs to consolidate her position. She's aware how vulnerable she is, how many enemies she's making.

14:06And rather like Boris Johnson bringing in Dominic Cummings of someone from completely outside the establishment. The Empress gathers around her a kind of loyal think tank, or even a kind of shadow cabinet, who are known as the scholars of the Northern Gate. And these guys are given an area of the palace, and they basically plot how she can seize complete power of China. She's already got almost everything she wants. The Emperor is nearly dead. She is in effective control, but she's ambitious for more than that. She wants total power. And it's these scholars who plot the path that we'll be seeing in the years to come.

14:45How does her family figure in this? Because, you know, the rumors are that she killed a newborn to get rid of her rivals in the court. She has sons, though. There are other children, aren't there? There's six children in all, I think, that she has. She is, according to these very biased sources, and again, we don't know how much is true, that she is using her family very ruthlessly. She has a very ambitious mother who is of aristocratic birth. She is around. But then I think the two fall out and the mother dies apparently of poison at an imperial feast. And again, the charges against her is that she's murdered not only her ministers and the former concubine, but also her mother.

15:23Because she's stepped out of line and isn't doing what she's told. And what we see over the years to come is the Empress Wu picking between her different sons for those most pliant. And the first crown prince is packed off to exile because he shows too much will of his own. And she ends up with one who seems to be some sort of deaf mute who's basically unable to speak. Speech impediment is what I had heard about him before, but you think it was even more than that. Yeah, he can barely communicate. And he's the one that's eventually elevated as he's considered to be no threat to his mother. What happens next is that the emperor finally dies.

15:59And Wu initially rules through this in the name as the regent of this puppet. This poor child who can't communicate and has some serious learning, what we'd call today learning difficulties. And this is the puppet that's put up. He's not even given a formal coronation. Wu is ruling in his stead. And all the time now, she is gathering a bunch of very bright monks who are part of Xuanzang's elite, who are coming in from India, from Nalanda, who are ambitious, courtly, and Buddhist. And she's finding a way to have a coup d 'etat, which will put her completely in control. But just let me read, this is my favorite quote from the whole period.

16:44The Confucian establishment is now absolutely hopping mad. They know that they've got, in their eyes, a psychopath on the throne, who's undoing centuries of work, who's breaking every established rule. And this is what one of them rights in 684. Again, we should say straight up, we don't know how accurate this is, but it gives certainly a view of how unpopular she is with the old guard. This woman, Wu, who had falsely usurped the throne, is by nature obdurate and unyielding, by origin truly obscure. Formerly, she served the Emperor Taizong with her body, then made use of an occasion when Gao Zong, the crown prince, was changing his clothes to commit fornication with him.

17:26Later, she brought disturbance to the parish and concealing her intimacy with the late emperor, secretly contrived to become the favorite of the sovereign. She plotted the ruin of the original empress, Lady Wang, and entrapped our emperor into incest. She slew her own sister, murdered her brother, assassinated her lord, and poisoned her own mother. Her heart is like a serpent, her nature like a wolf. Gods and men have cast her out. Heaven and earth have no room for her. She has harbored in her evil heart thoughts aiming at the mastery of the state. She has imprisoned the beloved son of our emperor in a side passage and raised up her own thieving kin to places of honor and authority.

18:10The earth on the emperor's grave is not yet dry, but where is his full-grown adult some. When you look at the world today, which family possesses the empire? God, that is brutal. That's quite something, isn't it? That is a brutal thing. She's a terrific... I'm longing to see the Chinese soap opera about this. Yeah, no, we should definitely watch that. Okay, so the Confucians, or the Confucianistas, as I prefer to call them, they are not happy. So they're putting up poison pen letters about her. But that can't be all that they're doing, because they're going to have to fight. They do have to fight.

18:45And there is now a full-blown rebellion in the 680s. And there is a revolt that begins in the south. But amazingly, the Empress manages to crush it in less than three months. He successfully mobilizes 300 ,000 troops, which is an unprecedented army at this period of history. And the rebel leaders are not just defeated, they're captured, publicly tortured, and executed. So all the resistance is wiped out. And this is the point at which she also gathers all the Tang princes and executes them as all potential rivals. Oh, really? Well, is it some sort of great – I mean, I just want to envisage this.

19:25I want to picture it. So she just brings them all in as what, honored guests? No, her secret police go out at night and bring them. And lift them in the night. Yeah, it's a godfather scene and she wipes out the tongue. Wow, right. Other than those of her own children that she thinks will do her will. Well, I mean, she's crushed the rebellion. She's got rid of the tangs, but she needs to cement her position among the doubters because you're still going to have the people who didn't like her to begin with, who don't like her newfangled religion, who see that the brave men rebelled against her and were crushed.

20:01These things are like whack-a-mole. You get rid of one and five others can spring up in their place. So she has to do something to be bigger than any challenge. And this is where her divinity story comes in, isn't it? Elita, you're absolutely right. She has been working with this group of scholars, the scholars of the Northern Gate. I love their names, by the way. They're so great. They're great. Scholars of the Northern Gate. This is kind of this little thing. And it's full of Indians. It's full of Indian Buddhists. And this, again, is a sort of extraordinary period of history that we just don't know.

20:35This is effectively an Indian Buddhist coup d 'etat in the heart of Confucian China in this period. And it's an extraordinary moment in Chinese history. And 10 Indian Buddhist monks arrive at the palace in the 680s with exactly the text that the empress had hoped for. And it's actually an old Buddhist text that's been known for a while called the Great Cloud Sutra. but it's come in a new commentary and interpretation. And according to the commentary, the sutra clearly identifies the empress as the divine August one, and no lesser figure than Zhuang Zhang's preferred spiritual guide, the Bodhisattva Maitreya.

21:19Well, there we are. That's the rubber stamp that you're looking for, isn't it? And the idea is that she may be a woman, she may be a Buddhist, but you can't argue with her because she is the divinely prophesied saviour who's come to save the world. And this is really, you know, her top trump. There's nothing that they can do after this. And it's a very, very clever move. She manages to have herself proclaimed the Empress. There's this lovely moment where she puts out that she wants people to report celestial signs and wonders to mark this extraordinary occasion. So everyone, you know, turns up at the palace saying, You have no idea what I saw yesterday.

21:58And people from all over the empire begin to compete with each other to inform her of these auspicious omens. So the emperor's staff are busy jotting down reports from all these people that are walking in talking about auspicious divine rocks, strange white magpies, three-legged fowls, chickens that mysteriously change sex into cockerels, a phoenix is seen perching on the roof of the palace, A red crow with vermilion feathers on a cinnabar body, which is a kind of symbol of prosperity, is seen flying through the hall of audience. Someone else trumps that with a whole flock of red birds reportedly flying through the hall.

22:38And any officials who call out such omens as frauds or outright forgeries are quickly demoted and sent off to the provinces. Well, it's mass hysteria. But this is great. this is mass hysteria because if you come to the court and you say you know what i saw i saw a flock of phoenixes that's funny because i just seen a flock of magpies that's fantastic so just sign here and here's a little bit of gold for your trouble and we'll see you soon and then of course that begets more and more hysteria about it and the stories spread word of mouth is so very powerful these stories are so compelling. So the monks have found this prophecy in this old Buddhist text, which describes a goddess, a Devi named Vimala Prabha, or the heavenly lady, pure and radiant.

23:27And this is someone who's been around in Buddhist scriptures for a while now. She's one of the Buddha's female disciples, who's kept her female identity. But in actual fact, if you look at the text of the prophecy, none of it actually works because it says she's going to appear 700 years after the death of the Buddha. This isn't right. It says that she's going to appear in South India, and this is clearly not right. As we know, the Empress was born in Szechuan. But none of this is allowed to matter. The text is edited, copied, and sent out across the nation. and the bit that's important is this line in the sutra.

24:06The prophecy of the Devi is that she should rule over the land in the body of a woman. I will send the Devi with rods of gold to punish any arrogant and recalcitrant men that refuse her. She will obtain one quarter of the realm of the Chakravatin, the all-conquering emperor. Harvests will be bountiful, joy without limit, the people will flourish, secure from desolation and illness of worry, fear, and disaster. And one thing that should be said is that for all this murder, for all this forced hysteria, for all the assassinations, China's doing very well at this time. This is a period of unique economic prosperity.

24:47The armies are conquering the Tibetans and the Turks. The boundaries of China are expanding. And one thing that really rattles the Confucians is that this is looking a bit like a golden age. Yeah. And so they all lived happily ever after. Or did they? Join us after the break to find out how this auspicious and full of signs and symbols start, carries on.

25:16Listen, welcome back. Just before the break, people were coming with their miracles to the court, which just tickles me senseless, to be honest. And she seems to have commerce, the economy, a golden age seems to be coinciding with her reign. I mean, some of it she has a lot to do with because she's allowing merchants in and Buddhist monasteries and centers of commerce to develop around China that weren't there before. Others, she's just damn lucky. She's come up on an uptick, as they would say in political economic terms. I'm a little bit worried about her disabled son though because he is now, he was a puppet, but if you do want ultimate power, you want to sit on the chair, don't you?

25:53And she's put her son on the chair and her kids don't fare very well if they get in the way. What happens to them? That's exactly right. So in 695, there is this moment when she finally breaks away with the illusion that she's ruling as regent to her son. The son is bundled off to the provinces along with all the previous chief ministers who've survived the purges. And she is declared the first and only female emperor in Chinese history. There's been no other since. There have been dowager empresses. There have been all sorts of powerful women. People have been mothers or wives, sure. But not in her own right.

26:30But she is the only emperor who's a woman in Chinese history. But does she give a reason? Because she's God. Because I am God. And all these miracles say I should take the throne. Hop it, son. She does two things. 695, there's this big moment, and she declares a new dynasty, her own dynasty, the Zhao, who are now in charge, she says, and she builds a heavenly city outside Luoyang. And it's an extraordinary moment. This is one of the great building projects of Chinese history. At the center is something called a Ming Tang, which is a Taoist idea originally. It's not a Buddhist idea. A vast, bright hall of illumination intended as an architectural symbol of virtuous government.