WU ZHAO PRODUCED AN IMPRESSIVE array of normative Confucian texts that prescribed proper behavior for women. Before she was empress, as Lady of Luminous Deportment, a second-ranked concubine, Wu Zhao composed Instructions for the Inner Realm (Neixun 內訓) in 654.1 Subsequent works for women attributed to the prolific Wu Zhao include a hundred-chapter Ancient and Recent Rules for the Inner Quarters (Gujin neifan 古今內範) and an abridged ten-chapter version of this text titled Condensed Essential Rules for the Inner Chambers (Neifan yaolue 內範要略), a hundred-chapter edition of Biographies of Exemplary Women, a separate twenty-chapter Biographies of Filial Daughters (Xiaonü zhuan 孝女傳), and a one-chapter Biographies of Tutors and Wet Nurses (Baofu rumu zhuan 保傅乳母傳).2 Wu Zhao was not the only seventh-century author of instructional manuals for women. During Taizong’s reign, Empress Zhangsun is credited with compiling a ten-chapter Essential Regulations for Women, while Taizong’s renowned chief minister Wei Zheng authored an Abridged Biographies of Exemplary Women (Lienü zhuan lue 列女傳略) of seven chapters.3 In the century following Wu Zhao, two new classics for women were composed, both modeled on canonical texts for men: Madame Cheng wrote the Classic of Filial Piety for Women (Nü Xiaojing 女孝經) and the Song sisters composed Analects for Women (Nü Lunyu 女論語).4 Unfortunately, none of the manuals credited to Wu Zhao is extant.
Wu Zhao did not style herself as the latter-day incarnation of these exemplary women, as she did with certain goddesses. Rather, as Gaozong’s empress and first lady of the realm, she lent her authorial voice of moral instruction to the illumination of these past models of perfect deportment, projecting them as cynosures for women of her era to emulate. Implicitly, this suggested that she possessed, internalized, and served as arbiter of those prized Confucian virtues: she was chaste, filial, benign, wise, austere, modest, obedient, and righteous. During her tenure as empress, when most of these works were produced, textual reinforcement of these sanctioned behaviors served to represent her as an ardent champion of Confucian values.
Though Wu Zhao’s hundred-chapter edition of the text is lost, a quartet of women from Biographies of Exemplary Women (presumably, women included in Wu Zhao’s version, as well as in Liu Xiang’s) have fortunately surfaced in one of the female ruler’s extant writings from a later stage of her political career, a political treatise titled Regulations for Ministers. The curious appearance of these four women—the mother of Mencius 孟母, Lady Ji of Lu 魯季, the mother of Zifa 子發母, and the mother of General Kuo of Zhao 趙將括母—and the fashion in which they are deployed provide hints as to the manner in which Wu Zhao drew upon the normative ideological sanction of celebrated Confucian women in past eras. Looking at the roles of these women in Regulations for Ministers, several interrelated factors become apparent. First, the two texts had very different target audiences: her Biographies was written to instruct women of the inner palace and wives of ministers in proper womanly behavior, while Regulations demanded total loyalty from officials in her court. Second, the timing was different: Wu Zhao’s hundred-chapter rendition of Biographies was promulgated when she was empress; Regulations was compiled when she was grand dowager and continued to be disseminated once she became emperor in 690. Though these widowed mothers neither helped establish new dynasties nor bore divine sons who founded revered lineages, Wu Zhao discovered a fresh political potency in these wise, principled women.
CONTEXT AND PURPOSE OF THE FOUR FEMALE EXEMPLARS IN REGULATIONS FOR MINISTERS
Wu Zhao’s Regulations for Ministers eclectically blended Confucian, Legalist, and Daoist writings, along with texts from martial traditions, into an elaborate justification of authoritarian power. Her text, two chapters of five fascicles each, features imperatives from ruler to ministers, guiding instructions gleaned from an array of three dozen texts. Denis Twitchett contends that this work reinforces the ruler-minister relationship “on a very personal level by stressing the amalgamation of the concept of ‘loyalty’ toward ruler with that of filial piety within family.”5 Emphasis upon these two paramount virtues, loyalty and filial piety, buttressed the Confucian ideology of order and hierarchy. Modern scholar Li Hexian remarks that the text provided an ideal blueprint for the ethical code of ministers, creating the image of a perfect machine in which each cog knew and capably performed its role. Such mutual interdependence, coordinated effort, and unswerving loyalty is necessary to administer a vast empire with multitudinous tasks.6 To this end, the opening fascicle, “The Same Organism” (Tongti 同體), articulates a vision of the body politic, the state, in which the ruler is the “heart-mind” (xin 心) and the ministers function as the body (ti 體), the arms and legs.7
Ministerial loyalty reached its full expression in single-minded and wholehearted civic duty. In the fourth fascicle, “Public-mindedness and Rectitude” (Gongzheng 公正), to properly fulfill their duty to Wu Zhao, loyal ministers are instructed to “exhaust their will for the ruler and the dynasty, paying no mind to private familial affairs.” Wu Zhao’s authorial voice continues, “There are ten thousand principles to administer the people. But effective governance stems from a single source. What is that source? Simply, it is public-mindedness.”8
Curiously, though their target audiences may be different, Regulations and Biographies—one, a political treatise designed to foster a culture of total loyalty among court ministers, and the other, a guide to dutiful and chaste behavior for women—appear to have been closely linked. In the mid-670s while still empress, Wu Zhao formed the scholars of the Northern Gate, an extra-bureaucratic group that compiled Confucian texts and other political treatises geared toward amplifying her political authority. The biography of Liu Yizhi (631–687), a leading member of this cadre of unofficial advisors who later became one of Wu Zhao’s chief ministers, records that the group was involved in the joint compilation of these two normative manuals—Regulations and Biographies—among others.9 In a passage that underscores her political ascendancy during Gaozong’s waning years, Wu Zhao’s biography in the New Tang History also pairs the texts:
In the emperor’s [Gaozong’s] later years, his illness grew increasingly severe and his humors were out of kilter, so that all of the affairs of the empire were determined by the empress. The empress thereupon, in order to foster greater peace and civility in governance, gathered a large group of Confucian scholars into the Inner Palace. They compiled and edited Biographies of Exemplary Women, Regulations for Ministers, New Instructions for the Hundred Offices, the Book of Music, etc., overall more than a thousand chapters.10
In these accounts, and several others in the official Tang histories, Regulations immediately follows Biographies.11 Compiled by Wu Zhao and the scholars of the Northern Gate, these two texts were linked by shared authorship and purpose.
The decade that Wu Zhao worked together with the scholars of the Northern Gate on these normative texts was decisive in her political career. Gaozong’s protracted illness worsened, prompting growing tensions about succession. She faced powerful antagonists in court. Domestically, the country endured a series of grim catastrophes—droughts, pestilence, scourges of locusts, and invasions.12 For Wu Zhao and the Tang dynastic house, these were precarious times. Amid this volatility, she sought to stabilize her own position through circulation of this series of normative texts.
In the late 670s, to guide her wayward second son, heir apparent Li Xián, Wu Zhao—exemplifying the concerned Confucian mother—presented him with two works: Orthodox Patterns for Princes (Shaoyang zheng fan 少陽正範) and Biographies of Filial Sons (Xiaozi zhuan 孝子傳).13 She also established the Classic of Filial Piety (Xiaojing 孝經) as a compulsory examination text in 678.14 The ambitious crown prince surrounded himself with a coterie of tutors and portrayed himself not as an obedient princeling and filial son but as one ready to assume the mantle of a Confucian monarch. In 679, he allegedly plotted to murder a soothsayer who had suggested he was not cut in the mold of an emperor. Shortly thereafter, hundreds of suits of black armor were found in his palace, indicating a plot to usurp the throne.15 Li Xián was banished and forced to take his own life in 684, shortly after Gaozong’s death.16
By the time Regulations for Ministers was composed in 685,17 dowager-regent Wu Zhao had recently deposed her feckless third son Zhongzong and relegated the nominal emperor, her timid youngest son Ruizong, to the palace of the crown prince while she “presided over court and issued edicts” (linchao chengzhi 臨朝稱治).18 Her paramount concern in this text was not with defining proper filial conduct for her flesh-and-blood sons, but rather, as the name of the text suggests, with designating behavioral expectations for men in court, demanding of these political “sons” absolute civic duty and undeviating loyalty.
As emperor in 693, Wu Zhao elevated Regulations to canonical status, placing it alongside the Book of Rites, the Book of History, and the works of Confucius as a compulsory text for all officials taking the civil service examinations.19
WU ZHAO, WIDOWED DOWAGER: DRAWING ON THE CONFUCIAN AUTHORITY OF WIDOWHOOD
In her work on the station of women in early Tang China, Duan Tali observes that widows and mothers enjoyed a particularly high status. Despite the injunction contained in the Confucian three obediences (san cong 三從) that a mother submit to her eldest son after the death of her husband, in reality a Tang widow “exercised tremendous authority within the family, not only as the true head of household, but also as heir to her husband’s prestige and social status.” A widow was responsible for managing the family estate and keeping it intact.20 As widow (after Gaozong’s death in 683), mother, and regent, Wu Zhao was perfectly poised to command the filial devotion and loyalty of blood sons and “political sons”—that is, court ministers and countrymen—alike.
Given the enduring influence and vitality of the Confucian system, texts like Biographies continued, in the words of Josephine Chiu-Duke, “to shape the Tang perception of maternal responsibility.” Such works presented women—especially mothers—as “a crucial positive force of society in general and of the state in particular.”21 Jennifer Holmgren has classified an entire category of women found in Biographies as “learned instructresses who advise men on social and political matters.”22 Tang mothers (at least those mothers honored in epitaphs or celebrated in their sons’ official biographies) patterned themselves upon these exemplars and, like these wise instructresses of the past, were well-versed in the art of governance. They guided their sons to successful careers in bureaucratic service, often urging their offspring to relinquish frivolous pursuits like hunting and falconry in order to wholeheartedly devote themselves to the state. In this sense, mothers wielded influence beyond the inner, domestic sphere. Inheriting the tradition of wise and upright motherhood touted in Biographies, these Tang mothers set public service and duty as a greater good than private, familial interest.23 This persona of the public-minded mother who placed loyalty to state above family, thus reflecting strong Confucian values, held a powerful political resonance for Wu Zhao as ruler.
Rather than offering filial devotion to men, these sagacious mothers had, by virtue of the edification and guidance they had provided their offspring, earned and duly received filial piety from their sons. By affiliating herself with this lineage of wise instructresses possessing profound knowledge of the political sphere, Wu Zhao identified herself as a motherly sage, the fitting object of filial devotion.
At the opening of the preface to Regulations, Wu Zhao portrays herself as a dutiful widow, declaring, “Humbly, I take the Celestial Sovereign’s brilliant edicts and follow their wisdom, seeking wise and capable men on every side.” Gaozong had taken the title Celestial Sovereign (Tianhuang 天皇) in 674, when Wu Zhao was made Celestial Empress.24 Far from claiming an autonomous authority, Wu Zhao represented both her promulgation of Regulations and her growing public political presence as the requisite actions of a dutiful Confucian widow of the imperial Li family.
Later in the preface to Regulations, Wu Zhao depicts herself as a model Confucian mother, announcing her “determination to rear and nurture, without partiality, children and ministers alike.”25 Thus, from the very beginning of this political manifesto, Wu Zhao sought to extend her maternal aegis beyond her own children. The preface continues, “The compassion and love of a mother for her sons runs especially deep. Though the son may already have accumulated loyalty and goodness, still the mother wishes to offer exhortation and encouragement.”26 As articulated in Regulations, Wu Zhao’s overarching motherly love, her avowed concern for the character, improvement, and well-being of her children, was not reserved for flesh-and-blood sons but embraced all her ministers and subjects, her political sons, in court and in country.
LESSONS OF THE LOOM: TWO MODELS OF MATERNAL RECTITUDE IN REGULATIONS FOR MINISTERS
Immediately after emphasizing the profound “compassion and love of a mother for her sons” in the preface to Regulations, Wu Zhao pointedly alludes to two episodes from the opening chapter of Biographies. In all likelihood, these famous episodes, no doubt familiar to every official in her court, also held a prominent place in her own hundred-chapter version of Biographies. Wu Zhao’s terse reference reads: “In the past though Wenbo was already a man of distinction, his mother still offered the metaphor of the axle; though Mencius was already a worthy man, his mother added the lesson of her cut weaving to instruct him.”27
The model of maternal rectitude featured in the exemplum of the axle is Lady Ji of Lu, also known as Jing Jiang 敬姜, a widow of the late Spring and Autumn era (sixth century B.C.). Not only was she represented prominently in the opening chapter of Biographies, but she also appears in other Warring States and Han sources, such as the Book of Rites, the Narrative of States (Guoyu 國語), and Accounts of the Warring States (Zhanguo ce 戰國冊). Jing Jiang is consistently depicted “as a woman of considerable expertise, who operates within (and appears to approve of) the gender codes of her society, but with no loss of acumen in expressing her views on both state and domestic affairs to her male relatives.”28
In her biography, the longest of the 125 in Liu Xiang’s work, “the metaphor of the axle” is but one in a series of instructive episodes through which she imparted wisdom to her son.29 Contemporary scholar Zhou Yiqun has observed that Jing Jiang “was acting on behalf of family interest and ultimately speaking in patriarchal authority.”30 Certainly, her powerful influence within her affinal family derived from her perfect adherence to Confucian principles. To wield such “patriarchal authority” with efficacy and confidence required far more than a widowed woman ventriloquizing time-honored Confucian principles: it took profound understanding of the classics, mastery of language, an adept grasp of rhetoric, a nimble tongue, and an opportunity provided by familial circumstances.
To shape young Wenbo’s character, Jing Jiang expounded on the humility and sagacity—the willingness to receive remonstrance and the meticulous self-cultivation—of Zhou paragons like King Wu and the Duke of Zhou.31 When Wenbo became minister of the state of Lu, she instructed him not only on the finer points of ritual propriety but on the art of statecraft.
Wu Zhao’s “metaphor of the axle” in Regulations was a reference to what Lisa Raphals terms the “weaving-government analogy,” an extended conceit that Jing Jiang used to explicate to Wenbo the nature of good governance in which different parts of the loom corresponded to different interdependent administrative offices.32 Raphals has scrupulously demonstrated that in Liu Xiang’s original text, Jing Jiang draws a correspondence between eight parts of the loom and the same number of central and local bureaucrats—from the director of messengers (da xing 大行), moving fluidly from hand to hand like the shuttle (kun 捆); to the general (jiang 將), playing the role of the selvedge (fu 幅), the vital straight border of woven cloth that keeps the pattern regular. Her intricate analogy culminates with the minister (xiang 相), the axle (zhou 軸), one who “can fill an important office, travel a long road, and is upright, genuine, and firm.”33 In late imperial China, a seventeenth-century thinker, Song Yingxing, observed that weaving and government share a common vocabulary: zhi (治) means “to govern” or “to reel silk”; luan (亂) means “civil disorder” or “raveling a skein”; jing (經), “canonical texts” or “warp threads”; and lun (論), “philosophical discourse” or “silk yarn.”34 Providing women a measure of political and moral purchase, this shared language reflects not only the metaphorical potency of weaving but the literal centrality of the weaving art in Chinese society.
Following this weaving-government analogy in Biographies, Lady Ji of Lu offered her grown but misguided son further counsel, once again evocatively through the figurative language of weaving. When Wenbo urged her to stop weaving and enjoy a relaxed and prosperous life, Jing Jiang sighed, “Lu is done for!” Vehemently, she remonstrated that in former times, the diligence of queens and noblewomen in weaving ceremonial apparel set standards for commoners’ wives to properly clothe their families. Virtue and diligence trickle down from top to bottom; so, too, do self-indulgence and sloth. If Wenbo as a minister of state failed to grasp this essential thread, the state of Lu was doomed.35
As we have seen in the chapter on Wu Zhao and Leizu, in early China weaving was women’s work performed in the inner, familial sphere. In the “Domestic Rules” (Neize 內則) chapter of the Book of Rites, it was famously recorded that “men do not speak of the inner, women do not speak of the outer.”36 Within the inner sphere, women wielded tremendous influence. In Confucius, Lady Ji of Lu found an unlikely champion. When the sage, who held Jing Jiang in high esteem, learned of her didactic engagement in the public and political realm, he remarked:
Disciples, note! The woman of Ji was not licentious. The Odes’ saying “Women have no public charge, but tend their silkworms and their looms,” means that a woman has public charge by virtue of her weaving and spinning. If she leaves them, she contravenes the rites.37
Her sage advice to her son in the outer, public sphere was articulated through the metaphorical vehicle of weaving; without ever quitting her loom, Jing Jiang capably imparted instruction on statecraft. While male and female spheres may have become rigidly delineated in later imperial China, in Jing Jiang’s time inner (nei 內) and outer (wai 外) were “relative and relational terms.”38 Honored as an exemplar of Confucian propriety, the Jing Jiang celebrated in Wu Zhao’s era, much like the strong-willed matriarch in Warring States and Han texts, was, in addition, as Lisa Raphals frames her, “a decisive and powerful woman who did not hesitate to intervene in either family matters or affairs of state.”39
Comprehending at last his own role and responsibility as minister, Wenbo humbly bowed to his mother in acknowledgment that her intricate metaphor had elucidated the mechanisms of governance. Wu Zhao no doubt hoped that, upon receiving the instructions in her didactic political manual, her ministers would respond similarly. Indeed, from the reference to Jing Jiang and the nature of Regulations, it seems that the text was an effort to condition just this manner of ministerial response: humble acceptance of the wise dictates of the mother.
The renowned mother of the Confucian sage Mencius is the other central figure from the opening chapter of Biographies who appears in the preface of Regulations. Wu Zhao’s pithy remark—“though Mencius was already a worthy man, his mother added the lesson of her cut weaving to instruct him”40—is an encapsulation of the best known of instructions the mother of Mencius imparted to her callow son. A more substantial version of the story of Mother Meng is recorded in Biographies:
Once when Mencius was young, he had just returned home from studying. Mother Meng was weaving. She asked how far his studies had progressed. Mencius answered, “About the same as before.” Mother Meng then took a knife and cut her weaving. Terrified, Mencius asked the reason. Mother Meng responded, “My son’s waste of his time studying is like me cutting my weaving. The superior man studies to establish his reputation; he makes inquiries in order to amplify his knowledge. This is because if his purpose is fixed, then it will bring security and tranquility; if it wavers, it can cause long-lasting harm. If you waste your time now, you will not be able to avoid becoming a laborer, and will meet with catastrophes and worries. How is that different from a weaving woman quitting her work mid-thread? How could she then make clothes for her husband and son, or provide food so they don’t starve? A woman who quits on that which she depends on to eat is like a degenerate man who gives up on his cultivation of virtue. If he does not end up a thief, he’ll end up a lackey.” Mencius was terrified and thereafter studied assiduously morning and night, without cease. He served his teacher Zi Si and became a famous Confucian scholar known empire-wide.41
Once again, weaving plays a central part in delineating female virtue. For the mother of Mencius, industrious textile production marked the fulfillment of her office as widow and mother—she wove not merely for livelihood, but to sustain her son’s education.42 “Mencius’s mother is not simply a weaver of cloth,” Robin Wang asserts, “but the weaver of Mencius’ intellectual, spiritual, and moral landscape.”43 She admonished her son that his haphazard work ethic would prove calamitous and inevitably reduce him to a lowlife. Conversely, diligent application to study might allow him to cultivate virtue and become a fully realized, superior man. Officials who read Regulations were familiar with the episodes from Biographies and did not need the whole story recounted. For them, the message was simple: undertake your office with assiduous, civic-minded devotion; otherwise, as a son, a man, and a minister you are a failure.
Wu Zhao’s pairing of Lady Ji of Lu and the mother of Mencius in the preface was not unusual. Robin Wang has noted that the mother held “the primary authority in the shaping of the mind, character and personhood of her offspring.”44 Lisa Raphals observes that a widow often “took on a didactic ‘male’ role and excelled in the education of her son.”45 Josephine Chiu-Duke has remarked on the repeated appearances of both paragons of motherhood in Tang epitaphs, representing the continuity of an established vision of motherhood.46 She has also shown that in Wu Zhao’s time mothers frequently were honored for raising sons to be public-minded, incorruptible officials, whose “filial conduct and loyal service reinforced each other without contradiction.”47 And if the mother in question was at once widow-emperor, political mother, and author, there was no possibility of contradiction: loyalty and filial piety could be yoked together and marshaled toward single-minded service to state.
Composing epitaphs to eulogize eminent women, poet-courtiers contemporaneous to Wu Zhao often compared the deceased with Jing Jiang and the mother of Mencius. In 682, Yang Jiong wrote an epitaph for the wife of the duke of Pengcheng (d. 682), eulogizing her “comportment remindful of the mother of Mencius” and her “admonitory presence of a Jing Jiang.”48 Shortly after Wu Zhao’s death, Su Ting, a censor during the latter days of her rule (who rose to become a chief minister under Xuanzong), composed an epitaph inscription that praised a senior princess for her “diligent study of the mother of Mencius and ritual knowledge of Jing Jiang.”49 Zhang Yue, a powerful chief minister under Xuanzong, commemorated a woman named Qin who died in A.D. 721 as a “Mother Meng for this age.”50
By Wu Zhao’s time both Jing Jiang and the mother of Mencius enjoyed long-standing repute as “intelligent, eloquent and authoritative mothers and mothers-in-law praised for the good upbringing they gave their sons and for their impeccable administration of the house.”51 Like the revered duo of wise, virtuous mothers of yore, Wu Zhao (as grand dowager) enacted the role of a dutiful widow. It was not desire for power and prominence, but a conscientious accountability to her deceased husband and affinal family that morally compelled to play a vocal and assertive role. Though as grand dowager and emperor Wu Zhao dramatically surpassed these women in terms of her overt political engagement, these widely revered female role models helped to pave the way for and justify her open, public involvement as mother of the realm.
Immediately after the reference to these two paragons of “Maternal Rectitude,” the preface of Regulations continues:
Recently, instructions for self-cultivation have been compiled for the heir apparent and for the princes. But as yet no model rules for providing information on loyalty and guidance of goodness have been set forth for the assembled nobles and the ranks of those appointed to officer.52
In this transition from motherly concern for the well-being of her flesh-and-blood children to a symbolic matriarchal preoccupation with her “children” of the larger empire, the preface shifts to the central theme of the text: the paramount importance of ministerial loyalty. As Wu Zhao set it forth in the preface, “Now in the leisure of my mornings, my mind wanders to questions of policy and government.”53 It is here the two exempla of the axle and the cut textile serve to bridge her transformation from conscientious mother of the imperial princes to ur-mother of a wider polity.
The affiliation between Wu Zhao and two celebrated instructors, Lady Ji of Lu and Mother Meng, politically savvy sage mothers who grasped the essence of statecraft and imparted that knowledge to their sons, legitimized her role in government. She situated herself as a patron of Confucian learning and an enthusiastic champion of Confucian values, a strategy that she used effectively, time and again, to deflect criticism from the court. She insinuated herself into tradition, so that to attack her was to attack these paragons of Confucian principle and virtue. And who would dare criticize Mencius’ mother?
Most significantly, in the mother of Mencius and Jing Jiang, Wu Zhao drew well-known models from Biographies who were pertinent to the crux of her political manual: instructing ministers on the paramount importance of loyalty to ruler and to state. Like those mothers of old, she was a widow concerned with the education of her sons—for their moral education and their performance in the public realm. But as dowager, she considered the realm to be her in-laws’ estate and took her ministers and subjects as political sons. Therein lies a primary difference: the two paragons from Biographies instructed their consanguine sons; in Regulations, Wu Zhao edified her political sons. Just as the flesh-and-blood sons of Jing Jiang and Mother Meng bowed humbly upon receiving profound lessons from their iconic Confucian mothers, so Wu Zhao’s political sons, receiving her instructions, were to genuflect before their mother-ruler.
MARTIAL MATRIARCHS: THE MOTHERS OF ZIFA AND GENERAL KUO
The mothers of Zifa and General Kuo of Zhao, two figures from Liu Xiang’s Biographies, both appear in the penultimate fascicle of Regulations for Ministers, “Good Generals” (Liang jiang 良將).54 Unlike the abbreviated references to Jing Jiang and the mother of Mencius in the preface to Regulations for Ministers, the entire biographies of these two women are lifted from Liu Xiang’s work and tactically deployed in Wu Zhao’s political treatise.
In his fascicle-by-fascicle summary of Regulations, Denis Twitchett remarks that “Good Generals” “reminds us that the empress ruled a state in which the military played a vital role, in which her great commanders were as important to the sovereign as were her civil ministers, equally essential to the smooth exercise of power.”55 While the subsequent Song dynasty may have “exalted the civil and disparaged the military” (zhongwen, qingwu 重文輕武), the Tang often employed the most talented men both as generals in the field and ministers in the court (chujiang ruxiang 出將入相).56 The all-encompassing loyalty and self-abnegation demanded in Regulations applied to generals as well as ministers.
During Gaozong’s final years and into Wu Zhao’s tenure as dowager-regent, incessant incursions from a nomadic confederation of Turks—galvanized under strong leadership of the Ilterish Qaghan (Ashina Gumalu 阿史那骨篤祿) who founded a second Turkish khanate (683–734)—plagued the western and northwestern fringes of the realm. The Khitan and Tibetans also harassed the northern borders.57 As a woman in a position of paramount power, Wu Zhao could ill afford to be perceived as weak. While she had no desire to broadcast a bellicose image to peoples of the periphery and foreign states, she needed to project a strong, confident presence. The demeanor of her generals served as the most visible external manifestation of her martial prowess. Many of Wu Zhao’s military leaders were non-Chinese generals (fanjiang 蕃将).58 In “Good Generals,” these military officers are repeatedly and emphatically reminded of their duty to the state.
The first of the two women to appear in Regulations, the mother of Chu general Zifa, numbers among the models of “maternal rectitude” in the opening chapter of Biographies, situated between the two aforementioned paragons, Lady Ji of Lu and the mother of Mencius. Because Zifa failed to share rewards and spoils with his rank-and-file troops, his mother refused to open the household gate to allow him entry. Zifa’s mother imparted to her self-absorbed son the importance of sharing with his men “in sweetness and bitterness alike.”59
Regulations relates, in its virtual entirety, the account of Zifa’s mother from Biographies:
In the distant past, when Chu general Zifa attacked Qin, his supply lines were cut off. He sent a messenger to report to the king. The messenger then asked after Zifa’s mother. His mother asked the messenger, “Are the rank-and-file soldiers in good fettle?” The messenger replied, “The soldiers have to divide a measure of pulse into sections to share.” She also asked, “And the general—is he in good condition?” The man answered, “Day and night the general sups on tender meats and fine grains.” Later, when Zifa destroyed Qin and returned, his mother closed the gate to the family compound and did not allow him entry. She sent someone to reprimand Zifa with the words:
“Can it be that my son hasn’t heard of King Goujian of Yue’s attack on Wu? When guests presented him with a cask of fine wine, the king ordered them to dump it into the river. Though the aromatic taste was completely diluted, the king’s virtuous act so inspirited officers and men that partaking of the river waters they felt as though they were intoxicated. In battle each fought fiercely as five.
“On another occasion, someone presented him [Goujian] with a beautifully wrapped package of parched rice cakes. The king again divided them among his men. The men split them up and ate them. While there was scarcely enough for each man to enjoy a mouthful, men and officers had the air of being surfeited. Embracing the king’s graciousness, each fought with the strength of ten of the enemy.
“Now, with my son as general, rank and file men divvy up grains of pulse, while he alone enjoys tender meats and fine grains morning and night. Why? How can a leader send others to confront scarcity and death while he alone enjoys plentitude and health? Even if victory is gained, martial principle is lost. You are no longer my son. Do not enter my gate.”
Zifa acknowledged his faults, then was allowed to enter. Thereafter as a general, he partook of sweetness and bitterness alike with his soldiers, in peace and peril sharing equally in their toil and travail. Embracing his grace and virtue, his men contended to be the first to brave the arrows and stones of the enemy. Subsequently, word of his meritorious reputation spread with each passing day. Those such as the mother of Zifa can truly be said to understand the way of the general.60
Lisa Raphals remarks that the mother of Zifa, clearly a strong-willed and principled matriarch, assumed “the admonitory role of a Sunzi-style strategist.”61
Immediately following the account of Zifa’s mother in “Good Generals” is the detailed story of the mother of General Kuo of Zhao lifted from the third chapter of Biographies:
Formerly, in the time of King Xiaocheng of Zhao, Qin attacked Zhao. The Zhao ruler sent Zhao Kuo to replace Lian Po as general. Zhao Kuo’s mother sent a petition, stating: “Kuo is not capable of serving as general. In the beginning I served his father.62 When Kuo’s father was appointed general and people presented him food, for every ten parts he kept for himself, he would distribute one hundred parts to friends and soldiers. When the king gifted him gold and silks, he shared it all with officers and soldiers. On the day he received his orders, he ceased inquiring about family matters.
“Now, when Kuo was appointed general, he faced east.63 His troops and officers dared not look at him. He hoarded the gold and silk the king bestowed upon him at home. When he sees good fields and nice residences he buys them. In ability and spirit, father and son are unalike. I strongly request that Your Majesty revoke his appointment.” But the king answered, “My decision is already made.” Kuo’s mother responded, “If it is Your Majesty’s final decision to send him and he fails to meet your standards, may I avoid punishment by implication.” The king replied, “Yes.”
Kuo then departed to replace Lian Po as general. In forty-odd days, as his mother had anticipated, the Zhao soldiers met with defeat. Kuo was killed and his troops were routed. Because of the prescience of Kuo’s mother, the King of Zhao did not sentence the family to clan extermination. Those such as Kuo’s mother can be said to anticipate the mechanisms of success and failure.64
Consistent with the remainder of the text, these two accounts categorically valorized public-minded civic duty and disparaged self-serving behavior that benefited private, familial interests.
The mother of Zifa upbraided her adult son, imparting a powerful message of public-spirited conscientiousness, setting the errant young man on the proper course to become a successful martial leader. Zhao Kuo’s mother goes even further. Repudiating her son, she directly petitions and speaks with the king of Zhao. Twitchett remarks that these back-to-back biographies in “Good Generals” very likely “reflect the personal input of the empress,” and that the “two anecdotes about generals and their mothers” served to “obliquely justify . . . [female] intervention in this masculine sphere.”65 Just as Jing Jiang only instructed Wenbo on matters of public administration through weaving, so these martial matriarchs justified their intervention in military matters through dutiful familial involvement: one played the time-honored role of the wise widowed mother instructing her grown son; the other’s public rebuff of her son’s self-centeredness saved her entire clan from execution.
Perhaps the message conveyed by the inclusion of these martial matriarchs was not so oblique to those ministers for whom Regulations, a text Wu Zhao elevated to canonical status, became compulsory reading. Herself a dutiful widow with grown sons, Wu Zhao possessed knowledge of military affairs, and could offer wise instructions to generals and sagely admonitions to her political sons. And like the mothers of Zifa and Zhao Kuo, Wu Zhao stridently placed public good above self-interest, something she expected (or, rather, demanded) of all her children. But Wu Zhao issued her instructions from a position of supreme power. Unlike Kuo’s mother, she did not need to petition the King of Zhao: she was the one appointing civil and military officers, receiving foreign emissaries, sending campaigns against peoples raiding the margins of her realm, and ordering public works projects. While it is true that in Regulations, Wu Zhao’s didactic authorial voice subsumes and incorporates the normative moral weight and power of the words of these long-celebrated Confucian paragons, the message was broadcast from the female ruler’s raised dais. Accordingly, her words were amplified a thousandfold, reverberating empire-wide from her Divine Capital, with a stentorian voice that carried to the harbors of Panyu in the free-wheeling south, the frontier garrisons of the northeast, and the bustling oases in the far west.
BEYOND MOTHERHOOD
Both the abbreviated references to Lady Ji of Lu and the mother of Mencius in the preface of Regulations and the full accounts in “Good Generals” reflect Wu Zhao’s effort to create a wider paradigm of motherhood, one that reached the entire court and country. As empress and grand dowager, she had long styled herself mother of the empire. In an edict promulgated shortly after Gaozong’s death, at roughly the same juncture Regulations was crafted, she announced, “I gaze as a mother over the realm” (zhen mu lin Chixian 朕母臨赤縣).66
As Gaozong’s coruler, Wu Zhao had been recognized since 660 as one of the Two Sages.67 In 688, established as a wise instructress, not so much by the rhetoric in Regulations as by her three decades’ experience handling matters of court, the sage became a sage mother. When a cryptic augural stone was found in the Luo River bearing the inscription, “When the Sage Mother is close to the people, the imperial cause will eternally prosper,” she assumed the title “Sage Mother, Divine Sovereign.”68 Wu Zhao maintained the moral authority of the mother of Mencius and Jing Jiang, but she had quit the weaving chamber and now presided over court and country. As both ruler and mother she became the recipient of convergent filial piety and loyalty. Wu Zhao’s assumption of the title Sage Mother marked the political realization of a broader motherhood, one extending to all the subjects of her empire, bringing to fruition the vision of maternity articulated in Regulations several years earlier.
One of the brilliant aspects of Regulations—the core of Wu Zhao’s political philosophy—was the elevation of loyalty to the pinnacle of the hierarchy of Confucian virtues, supplanting filial piety. Throughout Regulations, loyalty (zhong 忠) and filial piety (xiao 孝), the two paramount Confucian virtues, are conjoined. Twitchett observes that the text stresses “the amalgamation of the concept of ‘loyalty’ toward ruler with ‘filial obedience’ within the family.” But these two attributes are not equal: the primacy of loyalty is made manifest and filial devotion is relegated to a “lesser loyalty.”69 Such classification of degree is spelled out explicitly in the opening fascicle:
The minister serving his ruler is like a son serving his father. The deportment and reverence are the same. But though father and son are extremely close, they are not of one body like ruler and minister. There have been fathers without sons; there have been families without fathers. Yet there has never been a ruler without ministers, or a country without a ruler.70
The bond between ruler and minister is stronger and more indispensable than that between father and son. Summarizing, Lü Huayu observes that loyalty, associated in Regulations with public interest and the common weal, is presented in the text as a greater virtue than filial piety.71 Father and son are separate beings. The ruler and ministers are a single entity, interdependent, inseparable parts of the body politic. In effect, the role of ruler both incorporates and supersedes the role of parent.
In the second fascicle, “Absolute Loyalty” (Zhi zhong 至忠), state and ruler are once again placed above family and parents. The traditional family was a corporate body bound by patriarchal structures—entrenched and hierarchical ties of blood kinship that severely restricted roles of women. By elevating loyalty over filial piety in Regulations, Wu Zhao functionally allowed her authority to operate outside, or even above, the patriarchal structures of Confucian relationships. As an object of universal loyalty that transcended kinship bonds, as the governing mind-heart of a large single organism, she effectively circumvented the strictures of traditional social relationships. Family, albeit important, was secondary. A prospective impediment to absolute loyalty, family was relegated to the lesser realm of the private and personal, hence the diminished status of filial piety. Loyalty to the state was a necessary precondition for the cultivation of filial piety. Only once the foundation of state was stable might a family be united by humane bonds of filial piety. Family, the text forcefully asserts, is born of the state:
In antiquity loyal officials served their ruler first and then their parents; they placed the nation first and the household second. Why? The ruler is the root of the parents. Without the ruler, the parents would not exist. The nation is the foundation of the household. Without the nation, the family could not be established. Thus, it is from the ruler that the parents receive their existence. It is due to the state that the family is established. Therefore, the ruler is first and the parents second. The state is first and the household second.72
With no radical departure from traditional texts, Wu Zhao philosophically undercut any undue emphasis upon the female gender. At the apex, as “the ruler,” Wu Zhao was not a woman at all, but the nexus of the shared body of the nation, toward which absolute loyalty must be granted.
CONCLUSION
With a clever turn of logic, Wu Zhao lifted a quartet of paragons—the mother of Mencius, Lady Ji of Lu, and the mothers of Zifa and Zhao Kuo—from their usual stations in Biographies of Women, the Confucian woman’s guide to proper behavior, and transplanted them in Regulations for Ministers. Each of these women, carefully chosen by Wu Zhao and the scholars of the Northern Gate, used the moral suasion of her position within the inner, domestic sphere to intervene in the outer, political domain of men. Their message of public-mindedness justified their intrusion: each of these women guided less capable sons to dedicate themselves to wholehearted loyal service to state while eschewing private, familial ambitions. Relocated in Regulations, the carefully culled references to these four women were designed to represent Wu Zhao as a matriarch wise in the ways of governance—a sage mother, as the title she assumed in 688 announced. With rhetorical virtuosity, the conduct of these four women was not upheld for women to direct them in proper motherly deportment but set forth to dictate behavioral expectations to ministers, to instruct them in absolute loyalty to ruler and state. In Regulations, a minister was, by definition, one who “exhausts his energy in anxiety for the country and concern for the people.”73 As imperial commands of the realm’s mother-ruler, these instructions carried the weight and force of canonical edicts. Wu Zhao was not only owed the unswerving filial devotion due a parent, but also the absolute loyalty that a subject paid to a ruler.
With her deft rhetorical engineering of the “ascendancy” of loyalty over filial piety in Regulations, she situated herself not within the narrow consanguine confines of family, but as a sage mother, a mother of all mothers, whose brood extended beyond her immediate imperial offspring to the court and far beyond palace walls to her myriad subjects, Han and non-Han, of the larger empire.74 These ideal Confucian mothers, in essence, became vehicles that helped move Wu Zhao beyond motherhood, beyond gender: in Regulations, she becomes a forceful authorial voice of power issuing instructions to her myriad officials and subjects.
