Wu Zetian is the only woman in Chinese history to have ruled as emperor in her own right. She did it in the seventh century, in a court that held that women shouldn't govern, and she held power for roughly fifteen years under her own dynasty after decades of influence behind the throne. The men who wrote the official histories didn't like her. That matters when you try to work out who she really was.
From concubine to empress
She was born around 624 into an official's family and entered the palace as a junior concubine of Emperor Taizong of the Tang. When he died, she was sent to a Buddhist convent, as was custom for his childless consorts. His son, Emperor Gaozong, brought her back into the palace. By 655 she had been made empress, after a bitter fight at court in which she displaced the previous empress.
Gaozong suffered from poor health, and from the 660s Wu increasingly handled the business of government. Court records describe the two of them presiding together, and officials referred to them as the Two Sages.
Taking the throne
After Gaozong died in 683, Wu ruled as regent through her sons, deposing one emperor after another. In 690 she set them aside entirely, declared a new dynasty called the Zhou, and took the title of emperor. To support the claim she drew on Buddhist texts that spoke of a female ruler, and she promoted the faith heavily. The Longmen Grottoes near Luoyang hold a giant Buddha statue, completed in the 670s, which tradition says was modelled on her features.
How she governed
Her record is mixed, and both halves are true. She expanded the civil service examination system and used it to draw talented officials from outside the old aristocratic clans, which weakened the grip of a few great families on high office. She oversaw a period of relative stability and sustained the economic growth of the early Tang. Registered households increased during her reign, and the empire's borders held up reasonably well.
She also ruled through fear. She encouraged informers and set up a network of officials who investigated alleged plots, and many high-ranking figures, including members of the imperial family, were purged, exiled or executed. How much of that was needed to survive in a hostile court, and how much was ruthless ambition, is still argued over.
The problem with the sources
The main accounts of her life were written after her death by Confucian scholar-officials. They saw a woman ruling as a violation of the proper order, so they tended to dwell on rumours. Stories that she killed her own infant daughter to frame a rival, for example, appear in later histories, but modern historians treat them with caution. Meanwhile her real administrative achievements get less space than her supposed crimes.
The end and the legacy
In 705, when she was in her eighties and ill, a coup by court officials forced her to give up the throne, and her son Zhongzong restored the Tang. She died later that year. Her tomb, shared with Gaozong, has a famous tall stone stele that was left blank, which people have read as modesty, defiance, or a decision to let history do the judging.
History hasn't quite finished with her. Scholars today read Wu less as a monster and more as a capable, calculating politician who succeeded in a system built to exclude her.
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