Emperor Wu Zhao and Her Pantheon of Devis, Divinities, and Dynastic Mothers

LEIZU 嫘祖, A DAUGHTER OF the Xiling clan, was the primary consort of the Yellow Emperor, warrior god and civilizing force of the early third millennium B.C. Regarded as an exemplary complement to the Yellow Emperor, she bore him two sons.¹ During his interregnum, Wang Mang (r. A.D. 8–23), ever keenly attuned to the complements and balance of the Five Phases, set up paired shrines for this power couple from hoary antiquity—the Yellow Emperor matched with heaven and the Yellow Empress, Leizu, with earth.² Shortly after the fall of the Han, in his efforts to persuade the already willing Cao Pi (Wei Wendi, r. 220–226) to elevate concubine Guo to empress, court official Zhan Qian compared her with Leizu, the Lady of Xiling, and other talented helpers/spouses like the two consorts of Emperor Shun of antiquity, Nüying and Ehuang, daughters of Emperor Yao.³

Curiously, none of these sources directly mentioned Leizu’s greatest legacy: her role as the culture hero who discovered sericulture, invented the loom, and brought silk weaving into wider practice.4 The advent of sericulture and silken garments were important markers. “Historians of early China,” Bret Hinsch observes in his study on textile production and gender, “saw the ability to make cloth from hemp and silk as a primary distinction between civilized people and [wool- and felt-clad] savages.”⁵ Leizu’s very name is composed of radicals for woman (女), field (田), and silk (糸). Though texts from the Song recognize Leizu as a deity renowned for teaching people to rear silkworms and reel silk, the timing of her emergence as a silk goddess is unclear, likely because her identification with silk developed relatively late.⁶ In earlier texts, the Yellow Emperor himself was credited with the creation of sericulture, prompting Dieter Kuhn to speculate that Leizu’s emergence as First Sericulturist was closely connected to the gendered division of labor.⁷

Leizu’s emergence as a silk goddess went beyond the imperial ramparts. She was a widely revered cultic divinity in medieval and late imperial China. Contemporary historian Bi Xiuling has illustrated that cults of Leizu existed in Zhejiang, Shanxi, Sichuan, and other places. For instance, in modern-day Yanting County in Sichuan alone, the landscape is dotted with place names closely connected to the silk goddess: Cocoon Thread Mountain, Leizu Village Mountain, Leizu Plain, Leizu Cave, Xiling Gap, and Silkweaver’s Flats, to name a few.⁸ Leizu is still written into the mountains and valleys of the landscape.

During her first two decades as empress, Wu Zhao drew on the aura surrounding silk goddess Leizu. While the Luo River goddess was a lovely, anthropomorphized vision of the female element of water, Leizu represented the quintessential womanly vocation of silk weaving.

“Womanhood in early imperial China,” states Francesca Bray, “was defined by the making of cloth: with a few rare exceptions, a weaver was by definition a woman, and a woman was by definition a weaver.”⁹ The gendered division of labor in traditional China was expressed with the terse proverb “men plow and women weave” (nan geng, nü zhi 男耕女織), reflecting “a relationship of complementarity rather than subordination.” Weaving was fundamental to the well-being of family and the strength of the state.¹⁰ Sericulture (and other textile production) gave women in early China a constructive economic role, empowering them within the family.

Hinsch has pointed out that in early Chinese historical writings, silk weaving became part of the fabric of Confucian family values, not only an essential part of women’s work but a “moral activity” and a fundamental good.¹¹ As Hinsch explains,

To early Chinese, womanhood was not just an abstract passive female identity. A person became a true, complete, and successful woman by actualizing the major female roles that society expected of her. A woman weaving at the loom was doing far more than just producing valuable cloth. She was also acting out a gendered role that contributed to her overall social identity. Spinning, sewing, weaving, and dyeing were all ways of being a woman.¹²

Weaving was the essential enterprise of a successful, moral, and good woman, enabling her to become a “full-fledged woman by performing the ritualized behavior associated with her social identity.”13 In her Admonitions for Women (Nü jie 女誡; a Confucian guide to help a woman to survive and even prosper among her in-laws), Eastern Han historian and social theorist Ban Zhao (A.D. 45–116) placed “wholehearted devotion to sew and weave” at the forefront of the paragraph on “women’s work” (nü gong 女功).¹⁴

This rite, a gathering on the vernal equinox to jointly weave a ritual garment, served as the counterpart to the emperor’s sacred field ritual (jitian 藉田), in which the sovereign ceremonially broke ground to inaugurate the spring planting.¹⁶ Commencing with the reign of Han Wendi (r. 180–157 B.C.), the empress’s ritual work of “weaving with her own hands” (qin sang 親桑) complemented the emperor’s ceremonial plowing of the earth (qin geng 親耕).¹⁷ This marked the beginning of the codification of plowing and weaving into imperial rites, thereby augmenting the social and political significance of these long-practiced vocations.¹⁸ Dieter Kuhn argues that a silkworm goddess (can shen 蠶神) only became personified during the reign of Eastern Han sovereign Mingdi (r. A.D. 58–75).¹⁹

By the Jin dynasty, a wider cross-section of women were incorporated into the evolving rites: in addition to the empress, wives of lords were designated “silkworm mothers” (can mu 蠶母) and a widening circle of princesses, consorts, and noblewomen participated, arrayed around an elevated altar devoted to the First Sericulturist (xian can 先蠶), a goddess of silk.²⁰ The History of Jin, compiled by Fang Xuanling late in the Taizong’s reign, records the central and supervisory role of the empress in the rites performed in the Jin in 285 and 320.²¹

Modern scholar Chen Jo-shui offers a lucid description of this vernal rite held to pay homage to the First Sericulturist and its significance:

Only in the Northern Zhou (557–581) was Leizu, the Lady of Xiling—in what Dieter Kuhn terms “the final rationalization of the legend”²³—explicitly designated the First Sericulturist. The Northern Zhou empress and a group of attendant women presented libationary offerings and sacrifices.²⁴ The Sui History provides a brief description of the rite:

In the Northern Zhou ceremonial system, the empress rode in her kingfisher carriage leading the Three Consorts, the imperial concubines and a full coterie of palace women followed by the noble wives of the Three Dukes and the wives of the Three Solitaries²⁵ to the site of the sericulture ceremony. After offering the grand sacrifice of an ox, the empress presented a sacrifice to the First Sericulturalist, the goddess Xiling.²⁶

Set in the third lunar month, the sacrifices to the First Sericulturist were an elaborate five-day event involving not only the empress but also an expanded cadre of women in a series of choreographed ceremonial activities. In the “Treatise on Rites and Music” in the New Tang History, the protocol for the rites is detailed. The Six Matrons (liu shang 六尚), directors of various branches of palace services within the inner quarters, led by the directress of ceremonies (shangyi 尚儀), assumed responsibility for different aspects of the rites. Female ritual specialists helped coordinate the ceremony, including a ritual receptionist (si zan 司贊), a communications officer (si yan 司言), a scribe (nü shi 女史), a sewing manager (dian zhi 典製), and a supplicant (nü zhu 女祝). Consorts and imperial princesses, the inner noblewomen (nei mingfu 內命婦), wives of court nobles, the outer noblewomen (wai mingfu 外命婦), and other female imperial relatives played appointed roles.²⁸

For three days approaching the sacrifice, the empress and other women involved in the rites fasted and underwent ritual cleansing. On the day of the sacrifice, the empress traveled in a grand chariot, leading her retinue to the ceremonial venue. In the Tang, as in the Sui, the elevated altar for the rite was not concealed in the inner realm of the Palatine City but was part of a ritual precinct three li north of the palaces.29 After this public procession, all of the grand ladies were arrayed according to rank and role around the altar, where a ritual seat (shenzuo 神座) had been set for Leizu. After the rite, they first adjourned to a mulberry grove, for the ritual cutting of mulberry branches. With a golden saw, the empress cut three branches; then the inner noblewomen cut five or nine, depending on rank. Next, the retinue of women headed to a silk-reeling room, where an official gave mulberry branches to designated “silkworm mothers.” Leaves were stripped from the harvested mulberry boughs and passed on to select imperial concubines. This last group fed the silkworms and wove a ceremonial thread. The following day, the empress hosted a banquet for all of the participants in the main palace.³⁰ These rites publicly showcased the performers of the rite as exemplars of womanly virtue—none more radiant, of course, than the empress herself.

As the Chinese festival calendar became fixed by the early Tang, rites connected with sericulture and weaving became part of a seasonal biorhythm. On the date of the Buddhist Lantern Festival, women prayed for silkworms. On the seventh day of the seventh month, they prayed for technical skill in weaving. In the tenth month, offerings were made to Leizu.³¹ In 635, shortly before Wu Zhao entered the palace as a concubine, Taizong’s Empress Zhangsun, accompanied by a retinue of palace women, performed the rite to honor the First Sericulturist.³² As a fifth-ranked Talent, languishing in Taizong’s seraglio, Wu Zhao was no doubt conversant with the ceremony.³³

From the very outset of her tenure as empress, Wu Zhao played an extremely active public role. Shortly after she supplanted deposed Empress Wang, newly appointed Empress Wu Zhao was publicly presented from atop the Gate of Solemn Righteousness to civil ministers, military officials, and foreign chieftains.³⁴ In the ensuing spring of 656, she performed a sacrifice to silk goddess Leizu, leading eminent ladies of the state to pick mulberry leaves and feed them to silkworms.³⁵ As silk weaving was the primary economic activity for women, her central role in the public performance of this spring ceremony marked her as foremost among women, the human link to the divine silk goddess.³⁶

To underscore the ritual import of the event, the newly minted empress ordered the composition of a musical score, “Music for Making Offerings to the First Sericulturist.” The first stanza, “Ever Harmonious,” also known as “In Accord with Virtue,” welcomed Leizu:

In these lyrics to receive the silk goddess, it is as if all heaven and earth are clothed in silken raiment of the deity’s nimble-fingered fashioning; Leizu is cast in a celestial light, wreathed in spring zephyrs, conferring benedictions. Wu Zhao’s sacrifice to the silk goddess in the spring of 656 was performed at an altar in the northern suburb (beijiao 北郊) of Chang’an.³⁸ As this ritual precinct was eleven li north of the Palatine City, a lengthy ceremonial procession was required.³⁹ Naturally, such an occasion drew a wider audience, providing the new empress greater visibility and public exposure.

When Wu Zhao ascended the altar in the northern suburban ritual precinct, “Reverent Harmony” was chanted:

The next verse, “Expressing Respect,” was sung to the accompaniment of sacrificial coins being offered to the silk goddess.

The directress of ceremonies knelt and removed the jade coins from a round basket, rose, and passed them on to the empress, who, kneeling herself, offered them before the ritual seat that represented the goddess.40 This genuflection emphasized both the sincerity of Wu Zhao’s reverent spirit as she performed the rite and her commitment to the well-being of the common people. As “first lady” of the empire, the solemnity and dignity with which she undertook the ceremony might well initiate a bountiful year in sericulture.

A larger audience, “court and wider empire,” bore witness to the procession if not to the rite itself. Conveying the tremendous power and beneficence of the silk goddess, this verse depicts the venue of ritual performance as a site where the heavenly and the earthly, the divine and the mundane, converged on the principal ritual performer—Wu Zhao herself. No doubt to the throngs bearing witness to the cadenced movements of the otherworldly damask-clad beauty at the nexus of the ceremony, wrapped in a trance-like euphonic cocoon of ritual music as they beheld the empress amid the bedizening airs of flowers and incense, the boundaries between immortal goddess and mortal ruler grew ever more hazy.

Finally, after the sacrifices that concluded the rite, a parting toast of “Manifest Felicity” was offered Leizu:

Wu Zhao performed these vernal ceremonies dedicated to Leizu on four occasions. Following tradition, she included wives of high-ranking ministers.41 The First Sericulturist rites were only performed eight times in the Tang; Wu Zhao accounted for half of these.⁴² The second performance occurred in 669⁴³; the third in 674⁴⁴; and the last in 675, this time on the southern face of Mount Mang, not far from Luoyang to the north, with the entire court in attendance.⁴⁵ Speculating that the final performance of these rites might be connected to Wu Zhao’s assumption of the lofty title Celestial Empress in late 674, Chen Jo-shui observed that it “was the most unusual” of Wu Zhao’s four offerings to the First Sericulturist, not only because of the distinctive venue, but because “accompanying her were not palace ladies, but courtiers and territorial representatives from all over the empire.”⁴⁶

As grand dowager and emperor, Wu Zhao never performed the rites to honor Leizu. In 708, during the turbulent reign of Wu Zhao’s son Zhongzong, Empress Wei (d. 710), theatrically trying to fashion herself after her mother-in-law, also sought to play the ceremonial role of “first lady” and perform the First Sericulturist rites.47 Mulberries were associated with Empress Wei, and a “Mulberry Branch Song” (sangtiao ge 桑條哥) was created in her honor. In conjunction with these rites, courtier Jiaye Zhizhong suggested that his patron, Empress Wei, had “the spirit of a woman emperor” (di nü zhi jing 帝女之精). The courtier framed the song within a longer line of prophetic, dynasty-legitimating verses:

Formerly, when [Tang] Gaozu had yet to receive the mandate of Heaven, the empire resounded with “Sons of Peach and Plum.” Just before Taizong received the mandate, people of the empire chanted “The King of Qin Breaks Through the Ranks.” Before Gaozong won the mandate, people intoned “The Inclined Hall.” Before the Celestial Empress gained the mandate, everyone sang “Enchanting Miss Wu.” When Zhongzong was about to receive the mandate, the empire chanted “Prince Ying of Shizhou.” Now that Empress According with Heaven [Wei] is about to receive the mandate, people all sing “Mulberry Branch Wei.”⁴⁸

Jiaye Zhizhong even referred to Empress Wei as “mother of the state” (guo mu 國母), confirming her ceremonial role as first lady.⁴⁹ Clearly, Wei and the courtier-rhetoricians in her faction had learned much from Wu Zhao and sought to capitalize on the ideological and political currency vested in female divinity Leizu.

Even the texture, elegance, and colorful luxuriance of silk helped associate women clad in (or proximate to) the sheer fabric with immortals and divinities. Li Qiao and other rhetoricians who had helped to celebrate and exalt Wu Zhao continued to ply their literary talents in Zhongzong’s court to represent Empress Wei, the Taiping Princess 太平公主 (d. 713), and the Anle Princess 安樂公主 (d. 710)—the latter two, Wu Zhao’s daughter and granddaughter, respectively—as celestial beings in the company of divinities and immortals.⁵⁰ Once again, silk played an integral part in their poetry. On poetry outings, cut silken flowers were affixed to branches to create the colorful and wondrous illusion of an everlasting spring and an immortal world, a vision mirrored in the verse of these poet-courtiers.⁵¹ During one of these festive outings in 708 at luxurious Kunming Pool in the western suburbs of Chang’an, the gifted woman-poet Shangguan Wan’er 上官婉兒 (d. 710) sat boldly ensconced atop a tower of silk created expressly for the occasion. From that eminence, she haughtily cast down losing poems of poet-courtiers, until finally, from on high, she announced the winning verse.⁵²

The First Sericulturist rites were designed for an empress—for the First Lady of the inner, domestic realm. Scholar Bi Xiuling observes that the ceremony served to confirm discrete separation of the sexes and reinforce Confucian gender roles.53 As Wu Zhao started to play a more significant role in the outer, male political realm (first as de facto then as de jure ruler), it was no longer politically expedient to remind court and country of her complementary, feminine role. As grand dowager, she changed the name of the emperor’s sacred field altar (jitian tan 藉田壇) to the First Agriculturist altar (xiannong tan 先農壇).⁵⁴ This emphasis on divine farmer Shennong (the First Agriculturist) rather than silk goddess Leizu attests to Wu Zhao’s changing role. Similarly, in “Benefiting the People” (li ren 利人), the final fascicle of Regulations for Ministers, a political guide compiled when Wu Zhao was grand dowager, silk embroidery was relegated to the category of lesser work (mo zuo 末作), in contrast to the primary occupation of agriculture.⁵⁵ As grand dowager and emperor, she publicly played the traditionally male role of political decision making, determining matters of court and state and, not surprisingly, sought to distance herself from the female-identified silk goddess.

In 702, late in Wu Zhao’s reign as emperor, her nephew Wu Sansi 武三思, making a bid to regain political favor amid the cacophony of his aunt’s contentious court, composed a commemorative inscription for Wu Zhao’s mother Madame Yang.⁵⁶ The timing of this epitaph is curious, given that Madame Yang had been dead for three decades. Wu Sansi couched Madame Yang within a chronological line of eminent women of antiquity. Like Cao Pi’s courtier Zhan Qian 500 years earlier, Wu Sansi chased his praise of the virtues of Nüying and Ehuang, daughters of Yao who married Emperor Shun, with the remark: “Then there is the example of Xiling [Leizu] exalting the reputation of her clan, [two characters omitted] the palaces of the Yellow Emperor.” The epitaph continues, lauding the women who helped establish the Xia and Shang dynasties.⁵⁷ Of course, Wu Sansi’s flowery eulogy was intended not for deceased Madame Yang but for his aunt, the living woman emperor. For Wu Zhao—Madame Yang’s living daughter—was the natural culmination, the terminus of the glorious sequence of women listed in the epitaph.

In Myth and Reality, Mircea Eliade remarks that “a certain tribe live by fishing—because in mythical times a Supernatural Being taught their ancestors to catch and cook fish. The myth tells the story of the first fishery, and, in so doing, at once reveals a superhuman act, teaches men to perform it, and, finally, explains why this particular tribe must procure their food this way.”58 Accordingly, a ruler who stages or reenacts this primordial fishing rite both connects with that supernatural being and is defined as the possessor of esoteric knowledge and the keeper of tradition for these fisherfolk. Thus, when Wu Zhao paid ceremonial homage to Leizu, reenacting the discovery and invention of silk weaving, she connected herself to the apotheosized cultural heroine and established herself as keeper of the original knowledge of a sacrosanct craft that defined both Chinese civilization and womanhood.

A powerful Confucian aura surrounded Leizu: as the original silk weaver and reeler, she epitomized female virtue. She also was a symbol of the economic benefit a woman could contribute to the larger household through her diligent creation of fabrics. Significantly, the First Sericulturist rite allowed Wu Zhao to play a central ceremonial role. If, as Hinsch maintains, when “women spun and wove, they performed a social role that earned them respect and status,”⁵⁹ then certainly the First Sericulturist ceremonies provided the grandest stage to publicly celebrate womanly virtue. Because female virtue had become closely intertwined with silk weaving, there was great normative political currency for the empress who personally presided over successful production of silk textiles. Hinsch remarked that Eastern Han empress Ma (A.D. 40–79) effectively “manipulated this symbolic activity . . . to construct an image of public virtue by personally demonstrating her concern with moral female occupations.”⁶⁰ Wu Zhao similarly tapped into the symbolic power of this rite, broadcasting her role as the ideal Confucian wife and first lady of the empire.

In the arc of Wu Zhao’s efforts to develop a cult of female political ancestors during her half century in power as empress, dowager-regent, and finally emperor, Leizu might be called a starter divinity. The goddess appeared primarily during Wu Zhao’s tenure as Gaozong’s empress, the first of three phases of ascending power. Leizu, in her role as the First Sericulturist, was intimately linked to an inner world of women’s work and the womanly virtue of silk weaving. Once Wu Zhao left the inner quarters, more directly wielding traditionally male political authority, the silk goddess, once so prominent in her pantheon, faded into obsolescence.

Evoking the avian chain spanning the Milky Way to connect Weaving Maid (Vega) to her earthly lover Oxherd Boy (Altair), poet-courtiers Li Qiao, Su Ting, and Wei Sili all waxed rhapsodic about the “magpie bridge” linking the Taiping Princess’s lofty mountainside estate—a veritable otherworldly paradise—to the mundane realm below.61 Shao Sheng identified the Taiping Princess with another immortal, Nongyu, the elegant daughter of Duke Mu of Qin (a regional hegemon in the Eastern Zhou), who rose to become an immortal, joining an ethereal flautist wandering the mountain peaks, calling to cranes and phoenixes.⁶² In Song Zhiwen’s verse praising the luxurious “mountain pool” of the Taiping Princess, he gushed that his patroness:

Edward Schafer observes that in the capable hands of Tang poets, this Wu Girl became a “star goddess par excellence, a sidereal beauty who might be recognized among the jeweled belles of an earthly court.”⁶⁴ This was precisely Song Zhiwen’s intent, to illuminate the Taiping Princess and cast her in celestial guise.

Lu Cangyong’s series of effusive poems shed a supernal light on the grand estate of the Anle Princess, tacitly comparing its owner to moon goddess Chang E and the Weaving Maid.⁶⁵ In a collection of poems written to mark a grand banquet held at the residence of Shangguan Wan’er, courtier Zheng Yin populated the estate of the hostess, a veritable heaven on earth, with a host of minor Daoist goddesses like the Onyx Consort (Qiong fei 瓊妃) and the Jade Girl (Yunü 玉女).⁶⁶