In the spring of 1944 I visited Si-an, in the north-west of China. An archaeologist friend strongly suggested that I should visit the ruins of the tomb of Empress Wu’s father. He mentioned the extraordinary bronze horses and animals there; it was his discovery and as the place was some forty miles outside the city, beyond the usual route of the tourists, it was practically unknown. Kung’s enthusiasm was contagious, and we went off in a car. The plains north-west of Si-an are a vast stretch of mausoleums of kings of the past dynasties, from the Jou down, now dotting the landscape in mounds a hundred to two hundred feet high, completely abandoned and ignored by the local people subject to the ravages of time – just a series of bare, loess hills, sometimes very close together, presenting the appearance of a desert, silent and immense. 
      I have no recollection of the exact route which took us to the tomb garden, but we must have been driving for two hours. When we arrived at the rectangular enclosure, about two hundred by one hundred yards, and saw the bronze animals figures, I was truly amazed. Empress Wu – for she was an empress, and if she would be contented with being an empress, there would be no trouble at all – Empress Wu, in an effort to found a dynasty of her own, had created her father ‘emperor’ posthumously. The bronze horses standing on a pedestal were life-size, extremely well preserved. The surface was perfectly smooth and gold and patina shimmered in the sunlight. Neither my friend nor I, being no specialist, could tell exactly what went into the composition of the statues, but of their unusual high quality and workmanship there was no question. Such lavish indifference to the treasures of antiquity was characteristic of Si-an, the Tang capital ‘Changan’ in our story. This was my only indirect physical contact with the fabulous queen who dominated China in the second half of the seventh century. 
      I have written this biography of Lady Wu Tsertien rather than empress, as the study of a unique character combining criminality with high intelligence, whose ambitions reached truly maniac proportions, but whose methods were cool, precise and eminently insanity? Insane things have always been done by sane people, and the world, especially the modern world, is never completely clear of insanity. Was Nero, was Caligula, insane? Who shall be able to decide? Anyway, the amazing success of Lady Wu in proceeding step by step to overthrow her husband’s royal house was possible because she possessed a keen, cool intelligence, combined with boundless ambition and audacity. If her acts were criminal, she always managed to legitimize them. There is no question of her astuteness and tact and daring. It has always seemed that if a man kills a person, he is a murderer; if he kills three or half a dozen, he is a born criminal; if he kills hundreds with a well-organized machine, he is an entirely sane gangster chief; but if her kills by the tens of thousands, or millions, he cannot help ending up as a hero of history. We have seen modern examples of a eminently successful arch-executioner of all Bolsheviks worshipped as the world leader of communism, bowed to by diplomats, kowtowed to by his subjects and taught schoolrooms as hero and father. No, insanity is common to the ancients and the moderns. Nehru praising Nero is still a common everyday phenomenon.
      Lady Wu, as a woman, was anomaly. It is difficult to compare her with some other notable woman. Not Cleopatra, not Catherine the Great; a bit of Elizabeth I, a bit of Catherine de Medici, the strength of the former and the ruthlessness of the latter combined. And of course she was the antithesis of Maria Teresa. She defied moralists and perplexed historians who have not quite known how to call her reign, which itself is an anomaly, or what to call her by title. Because she was mistress, usurper, empress, and – what is still more confusing – ‘female emperor’, I have here used the term Lady Wu, corresponding to the Chinese Wu she. She shattered more precedents, created more innovations and caused more upsets than any male schemer in history. If Madame du Barry were to kill Marie Antoniette and the King’s three aunts, imprison Louis XVI for fifteen years while she proceeded to murder and exterminate all the Bourbons, thinking the Dubarrys a better race than the Bourbons, and send a dozen Richelieus to the gallows, we should have a comparable parallel. Or if Stalin were a woman…… As the story progresses, it will be seen that her resemblance to Stalin becomes more and more marked. Her killing of generals and elderly statesmen was the same, her purges and trials and techniques of tortures were the same, the reliance on ‘confessions’ the same, the creation of a false scare about large-scale conspiracies the same, her caprice, brutality and autocratic temper and love of self-glorification the same. Even the method of extracting confessions by nervous exhaustion was the same. She too created an empire of unparalleled despotism. Stalin was adored to his last day; Lady Wu almost to her last day. 
      I have written this story not as fiction, but as a strictly historical biograohy, because the facts would be incredible if told as fiction. The incredible is always true, and the true often incredible. I have not included one character or incident or dialogue which is not strictly based on Tang history. However, the element of interpretation is implicit in the most objective of biographies. While the facts are historical, a biographer necessarily selects and stresses the connections in any narration, while imagination’s eye recreates and reinterprets the living past.
      I have chosen, however, to tell it from the point of view of her grandson, the Prince of Bin, to give it a sense of immediate experience. For it is characteristically a family story, a story of the feud of the two families, the princes of Tang (family name Li) on the one have, and the Wus, the family of the empress, on the other. The prince, living from the age of twelve to twenty-seven in strict confinement in the palace along with his Uncle Dan (later Emperor Ruitsung) and his children, played the passive role of the persecuted; he saw his own two brothers flogged to death and his aunts, the wives of Prince Dan, secretly murdered and other daughters-in-law of the express persecuted to death. But he survived to see the end of the drama and the extinction of the Wus, and lived in peace and honour, after the restoration of the Tang House, for twenty-nine years under Emperor Tang Minhuang. He was born in 672 and died in 741, at the age of seventy. 
      The facts are based on the two official Tang histories, the Old Tangshu and the New Tangshu. All other historical works dealing with the period go back after all to these primary sources. The latter is a revision for research; where the New is succinct, terse and elegant – the purpose of the revision – the Old has fuller details and more unedited dialogues, besides the many letters and memoranda and edicts eliminated by the New for the sake of classic brevity; also the Old is based on several old shorter histories of the different periods, compiled by contemporaries. These dynastic histories contain one important feature: by far the greater part (150 vol. out of 200 in the Old, and 150 vol. out of 225 vol. in the New) consists of lives of the men of the period, with all the human drama, incidents and dialogues. From these ‘Lives’, and from the genealogical tables and special sections on rituals and music, costumes and carriages, foreign tribes, geography, astronomical phenomena, everything from the birth of Siamese twins, quadruplets and three-legged pigs to the change of sex (from a hen to a cock) – from all this mass of data, it is possible to reconstruct a clear picture of the doings of this strange woman. Stories found in popular novels, such as her early affair with the mad monk, or her issuing an edict to command the flowers to blossom in the winter, having no basis in historical records, are of course excluded. On the other hand, her cavorting with two handsome painted gigolos, the Jang brothers, is part of history, and was responsible for the crash or her dreams. 
      While at the height of her power, Lady Wu believed herself to be a demi-god – a Buddha Maitreya reincarnate. All unreasonable men and women who believe themselves to be demi-gods are liable to be discovered with feet of clay – a curious mixture of debauchery and fake divinity, of muck and glory; looked at closely, usually more muck than glory, as in Lady Wu’s case.
      The spelling of Chinese names in this book is chosen for the reader’s convenience, made so as not to be a tax on his memory. This Lai Jyunchen is shortened to Lai, and Changsun Wiji is shortened to Wuji, and this is kept consistent in the book. The first occurrence of such a name is given in full, with the omitted part in parentheses, for serious students who wish full identification: this Lai (Jyunchen), and (Changsun) Wuji. Jou Shing is spelled as Joushing. Strange to say, this practice of dropping sometimes the surname and sometimes the personal name, and of keeping both surname and personal name when the latter has only one syllable, is strictly in accord with Chinese practice in historiography and social intercourse. In a country where there are ten million Lis and ten million Wangs, necessity has made it decorous for a man to address another by his personal name; thus ‘Mr. Frederick’ for Frederick Smith.
      Lady Wu was a self-willed, inordinately ambitious and very clever woman. She did what no other woman ever did in China, or in the world. Her love affairs and her debauchery toward the end of her life have, in Chinese popular imagination tended to obscure the amazing political skill by which she dominated the government for half a century. Unique in the annals of China, she deserves a place among the wicked great of the world.

      In the spring of 1944 I visited Si-an, in the north-west of China. An archaeologist friend strongly suggested that I should visit the ruins of the tomb of Empress Wu’s father. He mentioned the extraordinary bronze horses and animals there; it was his discovery and as the place was some forty miles outside the city, beyond the usual route of the tourists, it was practically unknown. Kung’s enthusiasm was contagious, and we went off in a car. The plains north-west of Si-an are a vast stretch of mausoleums of kings of the past dynasties, from the Jou down, now dotting the landscape in mounds a hundred to two hundred feet high, completely abandoned and ignored by the local people subject to the ravages of time – just a series of bare, loess hills, sometimes very close together, presenting the appearance of a desert, silent and immense. 
      I have no recollection of the exact route which took us to the tomb garden, but we must have been driving for two hours. When we arrived at the rectangular enclosure, about two hundred by one hundred yards, and saw the bronze animals figures, I was truly amazed. Empress Wu – for she was an empress, and if she would be contented with being an empress, there would be no trouble at all – Empress Wu, in an effort to found a dynasty of her own, had created her father ‘emperor’ posthumously. The bronze horses standing on a pedestal were life-size, extremely well preserved. The surface was perfectly smooth and gold and patina shimmered in the sunlight. Neither my friend nor I, being no specialist, could tell exactly what went into the composition of the statues, but of their unusual high quality and workmanship there was no question. Such lavish indifference to the treasures of antiquity was characteristic of Si-an, the Tang capital ‘Changan’ in our story. This was my only indirect physical contact with the fabulous queen who dominated China in the second half of the seventh century. 
      I have written this biography of Lady Wu Tsertien rather than empress, as the study of a unique character combining criminality with high intelligence, whose ambitions reached truly maniac proportions, but whose methods were cool, precise and eminently insanity? Insane things have always been done by sane people, and the world, especially the modern world, is never completely clear of insanity. Was Nero, was Caligula, insane? Who shall be able to decide? Anyway, the amazing success of Lady Wu in proceeding step by step to overthrow her husband’s royal house was possible because she possessed a keen, cool intelligence, combined with boundless ambition and audacity. If her acts were criminal, she always managed to legitimize them. There is no question of her astuteness and tact and daring. It has always seemed that if a man kills a person, he is a murderer; if he kills three or half a dozen, he is a born criminal; if he kills hundreds with a well-organized machine, he is an entirely sane gangster chief; but if her kills by the tens of thousands, or millions, he cannot help ending up as a hero of history. We have seen modern examples of a eminently successful arch-executioner of all Bolsheviks worshipped as the world leader of communism, bowed to by diplomats, kowtowed to by his subjects and taught schoolrooms as hero and father. No, insanity is common to the ancients and the moderns. Nehru praising Nero is still a common everyday phenomenon.
      Lady Wu, as a woman, was anomaly. It is difficult to compare her with some other notable woman. Not Cleopatra, not Catherine the Great; a bit of Elizabeth I, a bit of Catherine de Medici, the strength of the former and the ruthlessness of the latter combined. And of course she was the antithesis of Maria Teresa. She defied moralists and perplexed historians who have not quite known how to call her reign, which itself is an anomaly, or what to call her by title. Because she was mistress, usurper, empress, and – what is still more confusing – ‘female emperor’, I have here used the term Lady Wu, corresponding to the Chinese Wu she. She shattered more precedents, created more innovations and caused more upsets than any male schemer in history. If Madame du Barry were to kill Marie Antoniette and the King’s three aunts, imprison Louis XVI for fifteen years while she proceeded to murder and exterminate all the Bourbons, thinking the Dubarrys a better race than the Bourbons, and send a dozen Richelieus to the gallows, we should have a comparable parallel. Or if Stalin were a woman…… As the story progresses, it will be seen that her resemblance to Stalin becomes more and more marked. Her killing of generals and elderly statesmen was the same, her purges and trials and techniques of tortures were the same, the reliance on ‘confessions’ the same, the creation of a false scare about large-scale conspiracies the same, her caprice, brutality and autocratic temper and love of self-glorification the same. Even the method of extracting confessions by nervous exhaustion was the same. She too created an empire of unparalleled despotism. Stalin was adored to his last day; Lady Wu almost to her last day. 
      I have written this story not as fiction, but as a strictly historical biograohy, because the facts would be incredible if told as fiction. The incredible is always true, and the true often incredible. I have not included one character or incident or dialogue which is not strictly based on Tang history. However, the element of interpretation is implicit in the most objective of biographies. While the facts are historical, a biographer necessarily selects and stresses the connections in any narration, while imagination’s eye recreates and reinterprets the living past.
      I have chosen, however, to tell it from the point of view of her grandson, the Prince of Bin, to give it a sense of immediate experience. For it is characteristically a family story, a story of the feud of the two families, the princes of Tang (family name Li) on the one have, and the Wus, the family of the empress, on the other. The prince, living from the age of twelve to twenty-seven in strict confinement in the palace along with his Uncle Dan (later Emperor Ruitsung) and his children, played the passive role of the persecuted; he saw his own two brothers flogged to death and his aunts, the wives of Prince Dan, secretly murdered and other daughters-in-law of the express persecuted to death. But he survived to see the end of the drama and the extinction of the Wus, and lived in peace and honour, after the restoration of the Tang House, for twenty-nine years under Emperor Tang Minhuang. He was born in 672 and died in 741, at the age of seventy. 
      The facts are based on the two official Tang histories, the Old Tangshu and the New Tangshu. All other historical works dealing with the period go back after all to these primary sources. The latter is a revision for research; where the New is succinct, terse and elegant – the purpose of the revision – the Old has fuller details and more unedited dialogues, besides the many letters and memoranda and edicts eliminated by the New for the sake of classic brevity; also the Old is based on several old shorter histories of the different periods, compiled by contemporaries. These dynastic histories contain one important feature: by far the greater part (150 vol. out of 200 in the Old, and 150 vol. out of 225 vol. in the New) consists of lives of the men of the period, with all the human drama, incidents and dialogues. From these ‘Lives’, and from the genealogical tables and special sections on rituals and music, costumes and carriages, foreign tribes, geography, astronomical phenomena, everything from the birth of Siamese twins, quadruplets and three-legged pigs to the change of sex (from a hen to a cock) – from all this mass of data, it is possible to reconstruct a clear picture of the doings of this strange woman. Stories found in popular novels, such as her early affair with the mad monk, or her issuing an edict to command the flowers to blossom in the winter, having no basis in historical records, are of course excluded. On the other hand, her cavorting with two handsome painted gigolos, the Jang brothers, is part of history, and was responsible for the crash or her dreams. 
      While at the height of her power, Lady Wu believed herself to be a demi-god – a Buddha Maitreya reincarnate. All unreasonable men and women who believe themselves to be demi-gods are liable to be discovered with feet of clay – a curious mixture of debauchery and fake divinity, of muck and glory; looked at closely, usually more muck than glory, as in Lady Wu’s case.
      The spelling of Chinese names in this book is chosen for the reader’s convenience, made so as not to be a tax on his memory. This Lai Jyunchen is shortened to Lai, and Changsun Wiji is shortened to Wuji, and this is kept consistent in the book. The first occurrence of such a name is given in full, with the omitted part in parentheses, for serious students who wish full identification: this Lai (Jyunchen), and (Changsun) Wuji. Jou Shing is spelled as Joushing. Strange to say, this practice of dropping sometimes the surname and sometimes the personal name, and of keeping both surname and personal name when the latter has only one syllable, is strictly in accord with Chinese practice in historiography and social intercourse. In a country where there are ten million Lis and ten million Wangs, necessity has made it decorous for a man to address another by his personal name; thus ‘Mr. Frederick’ for Frederick Smith.
      Lady Wu was a self-willed, inordinately ambitious and very clever woman. She did what no other woman ever did in China, or in the world. Her love affairs and her debauchery toward the end of her life have, in Chinese popular imagination tended to obscure the amazing political skill by which she dominated the government for half a century. Unique in the annals of China, she deserves a place among the wicked great of the world.