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

IN THE SECOND CHAPTER OF Sima Qian’s Records of the Grand Historian, it is recorded that Qi was the son of Yu the Great, legendary founder of the Xia dynasty and flood-queller who delivered China from eight years of rain, and a woman of the Tushan 塗山 clan.¹ After their marriage, Yu remained with the Woman of Tushan for a mere four days before embarking on his tireless mission: to divert and redirect the deluge.²

A commentary on the History of the Han Dynasty, written by Yan Shigu (581–645) in the early Tang, contains a passage, purportedly from the Western Han text Huainanzi, about the unique birth of Qi. As Yu the Great was digging through Huanyuan Pass, part of Mount Song, he changed into a shambling bear. While bringing her hardworking husband food, the pregnant Woman of Tushan beheld this fearsome creature and fled in terror. Pursued by Yu, she turned into a stone on one of the slopes of Mount Song. When Yu demanded his son, the stone into which the Woman of Tushan had metamorphosed split asunder and delivered Qi.³

While touring the Five Marchmounts in 110 B.C., the celebrated emperor Han Wudi (r. 141–86 B.C.) made a special point of visiting this stone of Qi’s mother. There, on the slopes of Central Marchmount (Zhongyue 中嶽), Mount Song, he established a shrine in her honor.4 During the Eastern Han, the shrine was refurbished in 123 A.D.⁵ Five centuries later, Lu Zhaolin (c. 634–689), one of the four outstanding literary talents in the early Tang, recalled Han Wudi’s “homage to a stone” on Mount Song.⁶ Three sets of stone que gates set up during the Eastern Han reconstruction—one dedicated to the mother of Qi—still survive. More than thirty feet tall and one hundred fifty feet in perimeter, the stone of Qi’s mother sits at the foot of Mount Song’s Ten Thousand Years Peak (Wansui feng 萬歲峰), one of the thirty-six peaks of the Great Room (Taishi 太室), the larger of the two major sections of the Central Marchmount.

Because Yu was so preoccupied with saving the empire from ceaseless deluge, the Woman of Tushan, according to Biographies of Exemplary Women, was effectively a single parent, capably raising her son and “bringing about his transformation,” so Qi was “fashioned by her virtue and followed her teachings.” Succinctly, the eulogy to her biography summarizes: “Tushan was wedded to Lord Yu, but after four days he went to manage the floods. Qi wailed and cried. His mother alone taught him the right order and precedence in human relationships. She instructed him to be good and in the end he succeeded his father.”7 In this manner during the Han, the Woman of Tushan was transformed into the ideal Confucian mother, selflessly raising her son and molding his character. In The Flood Myths of Early China, Mark Lewis observes that sage-rulers of early antiquity were often “bad fathers” who neglected or even sought to injure their offspring.⁸ Consequently, the mother played a greater role in shaping the child’s character. In styling herself as a caring, benevolent matriarch, Wu Zhao took women like the mother of Qi, this consummate mother of antiquity, as part of her assemblage of maternal ancestors.

In the third chapter of Biographies of Exemplary Women, “Biographies of the Benign and Wise,” it is recorded: “From ancient times, the virtuous kings invariably had an upright wife as a mate. If their consorts were upright, then they flourished; if they were not upright, then there was chaos. The success of Xia stemmed from Tushan and its ruin from Moxi.”⁹ From the Han forward, the Woman of Tushan was accounted part of a lineage of outstanding wives who assisted or supported their husbands in governing.

The Woman of Tushan was often associated with powerful dowagers-regent and grand dowagers. In the early late third century, following the death of Jin Wudi’s empress Yang, another royal consort wrote the following encomium:

In every aspect of women’s work she excelled: she led all the concubines and maids in songs of sericulture, she successfully cultivated silkworms, she skillfully unraveled the cocoons and spooled the thread. Her ritual deportment too was flawless: respectfully presenting offerings in the ancestral temple, always filial and measured in speech, and always gracefully adhering to the six forms of proper conduct,¹⁰ she never committed a transgression. Nüying and Ehuang assisted Shun, and the Woman of Tushan uplifted Yu the Great. . . . Clearly my empress, though from a different era, held fast to the same high standard.¹¹

This posthumous memorial lauded the Empress Yang with the highest Confucian praise. In managing domestic economy, engaging in women’s work of weaving, and conducting herself with reverent propriety, she understood her supporting role within her in-laws’ imperial clan and played that role without deviation from Confucian script.

In a song composed for the deceased spouse of Southern Qi emperor Wu (r. 483–94), his posthumously elevated empress Mu was cast as a latter-day incarnation of the Tushan Woman and one of the founding mothers of the Zhou dynasty of antiquity:

Terms like “inherit” (cheng 嗣), “renew” (chong 重), and “repeat” (die 疊) exhibit a conspicuous effort to present the empress as heir to the manifest Confucian virtue of these female paragons, much as male rulers fashioned themselves as political descendants of the glorious line of sage-rulers. Indeed, the exemplars in this lineage of women are generally the spouses or consorts of the sage-kings.

At the opening of “Biographies of Exemplary Women” in the mid-sixth-century History of the Wei Dynasty, the familiar lineage appears yet again:

And when a late sixth-century Northern Zhou empress took a loftier title, the imperial writ of appointment proclaimed that she possessed the “virtue of the Woman of Tushan.”¹⁴ Again and again, the vital female role in securing and maintaining the prosperity of the dynastic house is sounded.

“Biographies of Exemplary Women” in Fang Xuanling’s History of Jin, published at the end of Taizong’s reign, contains the assertion that “Xia flourished with the help of the Woman of Tushan,”15 illustrating that in Wu Zhao’s time this dynastic mother from antiquity remained a fixed part of a revered lineage of eminent women. At the end of the biography of imperial affines (wai qi 外戚) in this same work, it is written:

And early in his reign, Gaozong wrote the inscription for a stele at a Buddhist temple to commemorate his deceased mother empress Zhangsun that described her character as possessing: “The virtue that illumines Tushan, the morality that shines brilliantly on the bight of the River Guishui.”¹⁹ Tushan and Guishui not only denote place names, but they also connote virtuous female political ancestors—the Woman of Tushan and the wives of Emperor Shun, Ehuang and Nüying. By the mid-seventh century, this lineage of eminent women, first ancestress of clans and supporting spouses of dynastic founders, had taken clear shape. This provided Wu Zhao a solid foundation upon which to further build and enhance the cult of the mother of Qi.

In order to utilize the cultural weight vested in paragons like the mother of Qi to amplify her political authority, Wu Zhao’s task was a delicate and complicated one. She drew on the traditional role of the Woman of Tushan (and other eminent mothers) to facilitate her unprecedented political involvement. Yet, without leaving the fold of tradition, she needed to stretch its parameters, subtly expanding the role and the power of the mother of Qi to match her own rising influence.

Initially, she was comfortable employing the familiar, time-honored Confucian image of the mother of Qi lifted from Biographies of Exemplary Women. During Gaozong’s last years and early in Wu Zhao’s tenure as grand dowager, the mother of Qi often appeared as a perfect spouse and ideal mother who upheld the Xia dynasty. This implied, of course, that Wu Zhao was a perfect spouse and ideal mother helping to support the house of Tang. In an inscription drafted prior to Gaozong’s death, Yang Jiong, one of Wu Zhao’s stable of literary masters, wrote, “In marrying Tushan, the virtue of his [Yu’s] clan was thereupon made complete.”20 Consistent with the traditional depiction of the mother of Qi as a dutiful spouse, Yang Jiong emphasized her central role in continuing the ancestral line and enhancing the virtue of the Xia.

The mother of Qi also appears in a memorial that Cui Rong drafted: “When the virtue of earth supports heaven, the myriad sorts [of flora and fauna] are completed; when the moon complements the sun, the Four Quarters are illumined. Formerly, [the women of] Guishui assisted Shun and Tushan helped elevate the Xia.”²¹ Once more, Wu Zhao’s support for the house of Tang was tacitly compared to the Woman of Tushan’s great contribution to the establishment and continuity of the Xia.

Also during Wu Zhao’s regency in 685, the wet nurse of the Taiping Princess (Wu Zhao’s daughter) offered felicitations to Wu Zhao on the birth of her grandson Li Longji, the future emperor Xuanzong. In its praise of the Woman of Tushan, the memorial obliquely honored Wu Zhao: “The good fortunes of Tushan were due to the bountiful offerings made at Xia Tower.”²² In all of these instances, Wu Zhao was cast as a model of motherly deportment in the mold of the Tushan Woman rather than an independent female sovereign. The time was not yet right for her to step forth as an unadorned female power rather than a vital bulwark for male power. Once Wu Zhao moved to found her own Zhou dynasty, however, the mother of Qi was no longer utilized to present Wu Zhao as a good wife and dutiful mother to her in-laws.

The Woman of Tushan also appeared on the lengthy Coiling Dragon Terrace inscription (Panlongtaibei 攀龍台碑), written by Li Qiao in 699 on behalf of Wu Zhao to honor her deceased parents.²³ In this composition, it was not Wu Zhao herself but her mother Yang who was associated with the Woman of Tushan.²⁴ The inscription reads, “In the beginning, she equaled the [women of the] River Guishui; to the end she matched the achievements of Tushan.”²⁵ By framing mother, like daughter, as heir to a glorious lineage of eminent women, Li Qiao’s rhetoric cleverly merged heredity and politics and situated Wu Zhao at their apical convergence.

Wu Zhao reestablished Qi’s mother as one of the significant mothers of antiquity. After the female emperor’s deposal and death, the mother of Qi continued to appear in celebrations of prominent women, albeit resituated in her lesser role as an ideal Confucian mother and wife. Sometimes she served as a litmus test of sorts: Had an empress supported her in-laws in the manner of the mother of Qi? When Wu Zhao’s youngest son Ruizong died in 716, officials debated whether or not the spirit tablets of his empresses Liu (d. 693) and Dou (d. 693) should be set alongside his tablet. Arguing that precedent would only allow one spirit tablet in the ancestral temple, minister Chen Zhenjie memorialized, “In my humble consideration, the Luminous and Successful Empress [Dou] possesses the virtue of Taisi, and already receives ancestral offerings along with Ruizong. However the Solemn and Brilliant Empress [Liu] is not the equal of Qi’s mother and therefore should be honored in another temple.”26 Later in Xuanzong’s reign, the family of Empress Dou confirmed the exalted historical reputation of their kinswoman in an epitaph composed by Pei Yaoqing (681–743) marking the spirit path of Empress Dou’s younger brother. A section of the inscription reads: “My elder sister equaled the virtue of Tushan; she was the ‘King Wen’s mother’ of her time.”²⁷

Qi, the son of Yu the Great, was a powerful ruler in his own right, a rider of dragons who freely traveled between the terrestrial and celestial realms.²⁸ Sarah Allen has observed that Qi, whose name means “beginning,” was the last of the miraculously born Xia ancestors and the “first hereditary ruler in the historiography of ancient China.”²⁹ In the Mozi, it was Qi, rather than his father Yu the Great, who commissioned the casting of the Nine Tripods, the mythical vessels that symbolized the ruler’s virtue and the dynasty’s legitimacy.³⁰ Like the Xia ruler, Wu Zhao commissioned the casting of the Nine Tripods, a project initiated in 694 and completed in the spring of 697.³¹

Qi, whom Anne Birrell refers to as a “god of music,”³² either stole the music of heaven³³ or received it as a gift.³⁴ When Wu Zhao was still Celestial Empress, Cui Rong’s aforementioned memorial to congratulate her on the discovery of an auspicious zhi fungus linked her with the mother of Qi and the Luo River goddess:

According to the Classic of Mountains and Seas, “The Great Room of Mount Songgao is to the west of Chengyang. This is where the mother of Qi transformed into a stone.”³⁷ In antiquity, wives were also known as “rooms” (shi 室): in a sense, a room, then, was a womb. According to the Annals of Dengfeng, the two main ridges of Mount Song, the Greater Room and the Lesser Room (Xiaoshi 小室) were named for the two consorts of Yu the Great, the mother of Qi and her younger sister.³⁸ Huanyuan Pass, the great furrow cutting through Mount Song, divides the Greater and Lesser Room ridges.³⁹

From the Eastern Han to the Tang, there appears to have been scant interest in the mother of Qi and her younger sister. However, inscriptions from Wu Zhao’s era testify that during the late seventh century, the female emperor and her rhetoricians resuscitated the cults of these two sisters. Wu Zhao’s effort to apotheosize this pair of women began in earnest during the final years of her husband Gaozong’s life. In the second lunar month of 680, Celestial Empress Wu Zhao and Gaozong retreated to the mountains south of Luoyang, visiting the Ruzhou hot springs and a series of Daoist monasteries on Mount Song. After meeting Daoist master Pan Shizheng (585–682) on the vernal equinox, they visited Songyang Monastery and the temple of Qi’s mother. On both sites they ordered the erection of steles.⁴⁰ This outing marked the beginning of the elevation of the Tushan sisters.

Yang Jiong’s inscription not only linked Wu Zhao to the Tushan sisters, but it also helped incorporate greater Mount Song into her sacred geography, extending beyond her Divine Capital Luoyang. As Chang’an was closely tied to the house of Tang, Wu Zhao sought to create a separate sphere of power. In the Lesser Room inscription, Yang Jiong cited the first emperor of Qin’s act of engraving his name on Mount Tai, indicating that a ruler’s connection with sacred marchmounts was an important part of fixing boundaries and establishing empire. The literary master then exalted the ridge of Mount Song: “Among mountains and peaks, the Lesser Room is the embodiment of divine elegance. According to the Yellow River Chart and the Treatise of the Vast Earth,⁴² armor and bucklers were used to open up the mountains. The peak gives expression to the universe, spurting forth and gathering the yin and yang essences. . . . Carved and angular, it stands bolt upright, eight thousand feet.”⁴³ In the words of Jonathan Pettit, Yang Jiong artfully evoked “an alpine landscape fit for a goddess,” a mist-shrouded otherworldly realm where ailing Gaozong might await the visitation of a divine goddess.⁴⁴

A stele inscription written by Cui Rong for Gaozong and Wu Zhao’s equinoctial sojourn to Mount Song in 680 marked the shrine of the mother of Qi.45 Cui Rong, in his capacity as a tutor in the Institute for the Veneration of Literature during Gaozong’s waning years, worked closely with heirs apparent Li Xián and Li Xiǎn (later Zhongzong). Wu Zhao’s relationship with the former, Li Xián, who as crown prince was exiled for conspiring to rebel in 680 and forced to commit suicide in 684, was particularly frosty.⁴⁶ During her ascendancy, proximity to these heirs apparent and their cliques was dangerous political territory. Keenly sensitive to the shifting winds, Cui Rong—as we have seen in his memorial on the behalf of crown prince Li Xiǎn to congratulate Wu Zhao for the numinous fungus—rarely missed an opportunity to amplify the merits of the Celestial Empress.

For Cui Rong the memorial again afforded him an opportunity to ply his gifts to declare allegiance to Wu Zhao. While Yang Jiong’s memorial featured Shaoyi, ethereal and lovely, descending to visit Gaozong, in a case of aesthetic one-upsmanship, Cui Rong depicted the divine mother of Qi “as an erotic prototype” of Wu Zhao herself, not merely as a supernal dream-lover descended to rendezvous with a fortunate mortal but bodily “reborn again as the sage mother of a new dynasty.”⁴⁷

Modern scholars have long recognized the ornate magnificence and rhetorical force of Cui’s inscription. Timothy Barrett considers this inscription a tour de force of female power vested in Daoist lore, “a virtuoso demonstration of the amount of female imagery available in the less Confucian reaches of the Chinese tradition.”⁴⁸ Though Wu Zhao still shared political authority with Gaozong in 680, Stephen Bokenkamp describes Cui Rong’s composition as a manifest effort to frame Wu Zhao as a mother goddess: “couched in elegant parallel prose and studded with classical allusions,” the inscription, “while nominally dedicated to the ancient goddesses,” presents “Wu Zhao as mother and creator of a new heaven and earth.”⁴⁹

The following passage from the inscription displays something of the compelling rhetoric Cui Rong mustered on behalf of Wu Zhao:

Your humble servant has carefully looked into the temple of Qi’s mother, meaning the mother of the lord of Xia, Qi. In the Han dynasty, to avoid the taboo name of Jingdi, “Qi” was changed to “Kai” 開. Resultantly the name circulated, and some records call her “Kai’s mother.” And yet neither Gu Yewang’s Yudizhi 輿地志⁵⁰ or Lu Yuanming’s Records of Mount Songgao 嵩高記 followed the taboo order. Both referred to her as the Lady of Yangdi. . . .⁵¹

Formerly Huaxu trod in a footprint and became pregnant with a male child. Nüdeng responded to numinous spirits and the Red Emperor was made. The comet passed by Huazhu and the White Emperor was birthed. The moon penetrated Youfang 幽房 and the Black Spirit descended.52

So scintillating the Xia! So marvelous the Woman of Tushan! She married Yu on the very morning he began to survey the earth. She was joined in matrimony at Mulberry Terrace. . . .

The stone split open on the northern side, a sign of his birth. This is what Guo Pu⁵³ referred to as the “stone of Qi’s mother to the west of Yangcheng.” This is what Li Tong⁵⁴ called the “shrine of Qi’s mother on the southern slope of Mount Song.”⁵⁵

As Cui’s preface reaches its climax, Celestial Empress Wu Zhao restores the shrine to a veritable abode of immortals and reveals herself to be the living avatar of the mother of Qi:

Immortalizing Wu Zhao, Cui Rong depicts the Celestial Empress, his patron, as a divine being. Elegantly, he fuses the object of worship and reverence, the goddess, with her earthly sponsor and counterpart, the empress. In short, Wu Zhao was revealed to be the living incarnation of the Woman of Tushan, the mother of an ancient dynasty.⁵⁷

In the first lunar month of 683, on an outing to their retreat, Fengtian Palace on Mount Song, Wu Zhao and Gaozong sent emissaries to perform sacrifices at shrines for the various divinities of the marchmount, including the shrine of Qi’s mother.58

Given that the shrines had long lain in disrepair and the cults of the Woman of Tushan and her sister Shaoyi had fallen into obsolescence, the inscriptions reveal that both Yang Jiong and Cui Rong made a concerted effort to resuscitate these cults and invest these neglected sites with ceremonial significance. Thus, even before Wu Zhao became grand dowager, propagandists associated her with female exemplars of distant antiquity like the Tushan sisters, and sought to elevate greater Luoyang, particularly Mount Song. During her reign, Mount Song, so proximate to her Divine Capital Luoyang, emerged as the preeminent marchmount, a national center of ritual.

There were no further activities on Mount Song related to the Tushan sisters for more than a decade. When Wu Zhao was emperor in 695, however, she once again paid homage to the mother of Qi and her sister. The nature and timing of her announcement venerating the mother of Qi and the various tutelary deities of Mount Song are further detailed in the “Treatise on Rites and Ceremonies” in the Old Tang History:⁵⁹

In the Zhengsheng era, Zetian planned to stage an event on Mount Song.60 Previously, she had sent emissaries to perform sacrifices [to mountain deities] in order to pray for blessings and assistance. She issued an edict designating Mount Song as the Divine Marchmount honoring its tutelary god as King of the Central Heaven.⁶¹ His spouse was honored as Numinous Consort. In the past, Mount Song had temples dedicated to Qi of Xia and Qi’s mother, and to Aunt of the Lesser Room Peak.⁶² She ordered prayers and sacrifices performed at each of these sites. . . . Because during the feng and shan rites she had secured the protective blessings of the spirits of Mount Song, Zetian thereupon elevated the Divine Marchmount’s King of Central Heaven to Emperor of Central Heaven and his Numinous Consort was made Empress of Central Heaven. Qi of Xia was named Perspicacious and Sagacious Emperor. The spirit of Qi’s mother was invested as Grand Dowager of the Jade Capital. The spirit of the Aunt of the Lesser Room Peak was designated Lady Goldtower. Prince Jin was made Ascendant Immortal Crown Prince.⁶³ A temple was established for each.

Other sources clarify the timing of this titular elevation of the Tushan sisters: this occurred in the second lunar month of 696, several months after Wu Zhao performed the feng and shan rites on Mount Song,⁶⁴ the first time in Chinese history these rites were performed at a venue other than Mount Tai. Mount Song became a Daoist paradise, the Central Heaven.⁶⁵ In Daoist lore, the Jade Capital—associated in Wu Zhao’s ceremony with the spirit of Qi’s mother—was situated at the very center of the highest heaven where the supreme deity dwelled, presiding over a host of divinities.⁶⁶ Like “Jade Capital” in the title of Qi’s mother, so Lady Goldtower, the title bestowed upon her younger sister’s spirit, contained great Daoist resonance. In Shangqing Daoism, Lord Goldtower was an intermediary between heaven and humanity, a latter-day sage, a messianic incarnation of Laozi also known as Li Hong.⁶⁷ A passage in a Song-era miscellany records various titles of Laozi, including “Imperial Ruler of Goldtower.”⁶⁸ Noteworthy is the emergence of a third female deity connected with Mount Song under Wu Zhao, the anthropomorphized queen of the marchmount—titularly honored as the Empress of Central Heaven (Tianzhong huanghou 天中皇后).

Jade Capital and Goldtower, terms connoting both the sisters of Tushan and Daoist paradise, often appeared in Wu Zhao’s propaganda. Shangyang Palace, built in the imperial park of Luoyang during the Shangyuan era (674–676), contained both a Jade Capital Gate and a Goldtower Gate.⁶⁹ Liu Yizhi (631–687), one of Wu Zhao’s famous scholars of the Northern Gate, wrote a poem styling the Palace of Nine Perfections, a summer retreat in the mountains west of Chang’an to which Wu Zhao and Gaozong occasionally adjourned in the latter’s final years, as a Daoist paradise:

In the middle of Wu Zhao’s Zhou dynasty, Chen Zi’ang wrote an inscription for Laozi’s tomb, a composition designed more to exalt Wu Zhao than honor the Daoist founder:

The Complete Anthology of Tang Poetry includes a twelve-verse poem attributed to Wu Zhao. The final stanza makes further reference to “the Golden Tower”:

These Daoist emblems for the two sisters of Tushan, Jade Capital and Golden Tower, were vested with great cultural and religious potency. As Daoism was closely linked to the founding ancestor of the Tang, Laozi, Wu Zhao’s attitude toward Daoism was decidedly tepid in the years immediately preceding and following the inauguration of her Zhou dynasty. Her Daoist-ization of these two sisters in the mid-690s registers an effort to begin reconciliation with the Daoist establishment.

On a progress to Mount Song a year or two after she performed the feng and shan rites, Wu Zhao beheld once more the stele for the mother of Qi’s shrine featuring Cui Rong’s brilliant inscription. Later, she ordered Cui to compose another inscription for the site of the Altar of Audiences (Chaojin 朝覲), where the closing ceremony to the grand rites held at Mount Song had been performed in early 696.⁷⁵

Wu Zhao scripted relationships with eminent mothers celebrated in the opening chapter of Biographies of Exemplary Women, appropriating a Confucian manual of womanly deportment to her own political advantage. The Woman of Tushan was connected with the founding of the Xia, the first quasi-historical dynasty. Exalting Qi’s mother served to accentuate the role of the mother, of women, in continuing the ancestral line and enhancing a clan’s virtue—particularly when Gaozong was still alive. Naturally, once Wu Zhao became emperor, this aspect of Qi’s mother was deemphasized.

Anticipating the later efforts (like those of Du Guangting shortly after the fall of the Tang) to marshal various eminent women and divinities from folklore, myth, and history into a Daoist pantheon, Wu Zhao gave the Tushan sisters an initiation of sorts, investing them as Goldtower and Jade Capital, names rich in Daoist tradition.

Also, the Woman of Tushan and Shaoyi were associated with the Greater Room, the Lesser Room, and Yangdi, sites on or proximate to Mount Song. Along with Divine Capital Luoyang, Mount Song was an important part of the sacrosanct ground of Wu Zhao’s Zhou revolution. In addition to the summer palaces, the ceremonies, and the Buddhist and Daoist temples that dotted greater Mount Song, her connection to these cultic goddesses helped Wu Zhao anchor her ties to this sacred topography.