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

From an array of different ancient directional goddesses who appear on Shang oracle bone inscriptions, the Queen Mother of the West comes into clear resolution in the Zhuangzi (a Warring States–era text) as a woman who had attained the dao.¹ As Elfriede Knauer frames it, “after a long break she becomes a powerful shaman and teacher of privileged human beings and a mediatrix between the heavenly and earthly realms.”² For Xunzi (312–230 B.C.), she was a divine teacher who instructed legendary flood-queller and Xia founder, Yu the Great.³ In the Classic of Mountains and Seas (a text likely dating to the first century B.C.), a vision of a primitive and potent Queen Mother is evoked:

A deity who presides over a mountain wilderness in the west and lives among wild beasts. In these accounts she is described as a human with unkempt hair, a panther’s tail, and tiger’s fangs, and she has a retinue of feline beasts and birds that bring her messages and food . . . Her mountain realm is designated as being in the west, and it is said to be the sacred range of Kunlun.⁴

From this primitive incarnation as a “ruthless goddess of prey,”6 the Queen Mother evolved during the Han, becoming a beautiful ageless divinity, an immortal monarch celebrated in both popular and elite culture, replete with headdress, staff, and scepter. She emerged as “the first personified female deity to predominate as the focus of popular religious devotion.”⁷

In Liu An’s Huainanzi, she presented an elixir of immortality to Yi the Archer (Hou Yi 后羿), though it subsequently was stolen by moon goddess Chang E.⁸ This late Western Han text also contains a passage in which the Queen Mother snapped her headdress, precipitating a string of catastrophes—an episode, Michael Loewe suggests, demonstrating that she wielded some control over the cosmic order and the movement of the constellations.⁹ Liu Xiang’s Biographies of Immortals (Liexian zhuan 列仙傳) viewed the Queen Mother as “creator of Heaven and Earth, molder of all things that are created, mistress acknowledged by all those who ascend to Heaven or descend to Earth.”¹⁰ To alleviate a drought during the waning years of the Western Han, in 3 B.C., adherents of the Queen Mother carried sheaves of millet to honor her, indicating that she had already emerged as a cultic divinity, perhaps a rain goddess or agricultural deity.¹¹ The cult endured: Episodes in the Jin and Sui official histories report that as far west as Kokonor (near Qinghai Lake), the faithful worshipped at shrines dedicated to the Queen Mother, who, in the guise of a rain goddess, delivered the afflicted from drought.¹²

Colorful lore grew around her. According to esoteric master Guo Xian’s Record of Penetrating Mysteries (Dongming ji 洞冥記, c. first century A.D.), the Queen Mother made a cameo appearance two centuries earlier during Han Wudi’s reign, appearing astride a simurgh (luan 鸞), turning darkness to daylight as she traversed the heavens singing a lilting paean to spring.13 The Queen Mother’s mountain lair in the Kunlun Mountains had evolved into a western paradise.¹⁴ Western Han teller of supernatural tales Dongfang Shuo (c. 160–93 B.C.) rode one of her wind-striding horses.¹⁵ The Biography of King Mu (Mu tianzi zhuan 穆天子傳) describes King Mu of Zhou (c. tenth century B.C.) and the Queen Mother banqueting and exchanging gifts atop Mount Yan.¹⁶ There are also stories of the Queen Mother sharing intimacy, peaches, and the secrets of immortality with Han Wudi.¹⁷ Eight hundred years later, these divine/mortal trysts remained alive in the Tang literary imagination. Association with a goddess conferred tremendous power upon a mortal ruler. As Near Eastern historian Henri Frankfort frames it, “only those kings were deified who had been commanded by a goddess to share her couch.”¹⁸

A rich iconographic tradition developed around the Queen Mother of the West.¹⁹ Marshaling evidence from a series of Han tombs beginning in the first century B.C., Wu Hung convincingly argues that the Queen Mother supplanted Nüwa as “the embodiment of yin force.”²⁰ In southern China, beginning during the Northern and Southern Dynasties era, the Queen Mother, coupled with male counterpart King Father of the East, appeared on many elaborate decorative mirrors.²¹

Suzanne Cahill has observed that by the Tang there was a well-established literary tradition “commemorating visits to cultic centers of archaic goddesses.” Tang poetry, she notes, abounds with scenarios containing “allusions to legends concerning the goddess [the Queen Mother of the West] and mortal Chinese rulers, an epiphany of the goddess, and some communication between the divine and human realms.” Tang poets frequently riffed on the rapturous delight of hierogamous dalliances between King Mu or Han Wudi and the Queen Mother of the West. Studded with references to earlier encounters between mortals and the timeless goddess, one of Li Shangyin’s poems rhapsodically describes a visit to the shrine of the Queen Mother on Mount Hua.²² Cahill has shown that during the Tang several marchmounts had shrines or temples dedicated to the Queen Mother.²³ Tang poets like Chu Guangxi (c. 707–760), Liu Fu (c. early ninth century), Liu Yuxi (772–842), Liu Cang (fl. mid-ninth century), and Wu Rong (fl. late ninth century) all rapturously described the Queen Mother’s immortal grace.²⁴ Though these poets herald from the mid- to the late Tang, dating from after Wu Zhao’s demise and death, their verses collectively describe the cult of a deity still worshipped, reflecting her continuing cultural resonance.

In her extensive work on the goddess, Cahill has illustrated that, by the Tang, the Queen Mother of the West had developed into the highest female divinity in the Daoist pantheon,²⁵ a powerful patron deity of women who possessed “control over immortality and power to mediate between the divine and human realm.”²⁶

Through ceremony and symbol, in decorative silk and polished jade, Wu Zhao linked herself to the Queen Mother of the West. Though these connections were not always explicit, they were presented through culturally legible rites and gestures understood by court and country alike.

In the Classic of Mountains and Seas, it is recorded that the Queen Mother of the West lived on Jade Mountain.27 As a medium, jade symbolizes incorruptibility and eternal life.²⁸ A substance of beauty and power, jade (yu 玉) shares a radical with “king” (wang 王). When King Mu of Zhou and the Queen Mother exchanged gifts atop Mount Yan, he offered her a white jade token.²⁹ There is another story dating from the Han of a scholar-recluse who rescued a messenger of the Queen Mother of the West, a golden sparrow. In return, assuming human guise and making known his position in the Queen Mother’s service, a yellow-liveried man presented his rescuer four white jade rings and promised that his savior’s offspring would rise to become eminent officials.³⁰ In 676, Cui Shen, the prefect of Chuzhou, presented thirteen treasures of state at the court of the Celestial Emperor and Celestial Empress—as Gaozong and Wu Zhao were known at the time. The fourth treasure consisted of two jade rings belonging to the Queen Mother of the West.³¹ Thus, Wu Zhao came to possess this jade token of the Queen Mother, at once an emblem of the divinity’s magical power and a tally of political authority.

Through this precious medium of white jade, one can find further connections between the earthly ruler and the celestial sovereign. The Miscellaneous Records of the Taiping Era relates a story in which the Queen Mother of the West presented a white jade—seemingly her preferred ceremonial medium—guan 琯 ritual tube to Emperor Shun. In the Han, the white jade guan was found under Shun’s shrine. Ritual specialists learned how the ancients used the ceremonial guan as an instrument to harmonize men and spirits. The technique was called “regulation of the phoenix” (fenghuang yi 鳳凰儀).³² Yi can mean “to regulate” or “regulator,” a kind of ritual instrument (yi qi 儀器).³³ When Gaozong offered to abdicate to Wu Zhao in 676, a phoenix, a potent auspicious omen of female imperial power, was sighted in Chenzhou, prompting the inauguration of Phoenix Regulator,³⁴ a reign era whose name tacitly announced Wu Zhao’s instrumental role in securing harmony between the celestial and terrestrial realms.

There are further indications that the phoenix was an important symbol of power for both the Queen Mother of the West and Wu Zhao. Wu Hong has remarked that in the Wu Liang shrine, the Queen Mother wore a “crown of five phoenixes” (wu feng guan 五鳳冠).35 According to one source, likely from the sixth century, atop Kunlun—the mountain citadel of the Queen Mother—there was a massive bronze pillar that reached the heavens. Atop the pillar was an immense bird, facing southward. This regal avian’s outstretched wingspan sheltered the Queen Mother to the west and the King Father to the east.³⁶ Though it is not clear whether this monumental creature was a phoenix, it seems likely that this image inspired Wu Zhao to crown both of her Bright Hall complexes with massive phoenixes, their wings outspread.³⁷ Wu Zhao crowned her first Bright Hall complex, completed in 688, with a ten-foot-tall gilded iron phoenix poised for flight.³⁸ Wu Zhao named her second Bright Hall, completed in 696, Penetrating Heaven Palace (Tongtiangong 通天宮), and topped it with a finial phoenix taking flight, twice as large as the first.³⁹ The name Penetrating Heaven provides another curious link between Wu Zhao and the Queen Mother of the West. In 110 B.C., when Han Wudi, the Queen Mother’s mortal lover, performed the feng and shan rites on Mount Tai, he constructed a Penetrating Heaven Terrace (Tongtiantai 通天台) to commune with immortals.⁴⁰ The name of her ritual complex betokened a liminal site at the confluence of the mortal realm and the world of spirits.

A shared involvement in sericulture and weaving provides further suggestion of linkage between the earthly ruler of the late seventh century and the Daoist goddess. In his Annals of Revelations of Diverse States (Bieguo dongming ji 別國洞冥記), Dongfang Shuo records the Queen Mother of the West picking mulberry leaves. During the ceremonial gathering of mulberry leaves in the Eastern Han, imperial ladies wore a sheng 勝 (lit.: victory), the signature crown of the Queen Mother.⁴¹ Appearing as “two spools joined by a horizontal rod,” to each “attached a twirl of thread,” the “victory” headdress of the Queen Mother of the West may have represented a weaving implement, the brake pedal of the loom.⁴² A Tang mirror housed in the Kyoto Museum features just such an image, accompanied by the inscription “golden victory headdress” (jin sheng 金勝).⁴³

As empress, Wu Zhao performed the First Sericulturist rites to honor the silk goddess on four occasions between 656 and 675, leading palace women and wives of high-ranking officials to pick mulberry leaves in a vernal rite.44 In the sericulture rite, before a large assembled audience, the empress knelt humbly in front of an empty ritual seat representing the goddess. In the collective imagination, that empty place might be filled by the Queen Mother of the West, with her loom-inspired headdress, rather than Leizu. Wu Zhao’s public ritual homage made manifest her connection to these female divinities. To all those present, the empress’s repeated public performance of the sericulture rites were ceremonial acts that evoked the aura of these two divinities, and identified the female sovereign with them.

Wu Zhao shared a series of culturally resonant symbols and rituals with the Queen Mother of the West. The Chuzhou prefect’s presentation of the rings of white jade illustrates that political supporters of Wu Zhao sought emblematic connections between their Celestial Empress and the Queen Mother of the West. The phoenix developed into an important symbol of harmonious order and regulatory authority. Wu Zhao’s performance of the First Sericulturist rites honored the Queen Mother of the West and silk goddess Leizu and in turn helped link the empress to both divinities. Notably, most of these shared symbols appear during Wu Zhao’s time as Gaozong’s empress, a time when she, in the words of Eugene Wang, “eagerly maintained the imperial clan’s interest in Daoism.”⁴⁵

Ever willing to draw upon efficacious symbols of majesty, Wu Zhao incorporated both celestial orbs, male sun and female moon, into her repertoire. Like the Daoist goddess, the female sovereign appropriated celestial symbols from hoary myth: the sunbird (yang niao 陽鳥, the mythological three-legged solar crow, with origins dating back to the Eastern Yi culture in the third millennium B.C.)⁴⁶ and the pair of lunar denizens, the hare and the toad.

Michael Loewe has remarked that during the Han dynasty, the crescent moon with toad and hare and the solar disk encircling a sunbird or crow became recurring symbols associated with the Queen Mother of the West.⁴⁷ In Sima Xiangru’s (179–127 B.C.) “Rhapsody of a Great Man,” written for Han Wudi, the Queen Mother of the West is described as possessing a three-legged crow, which served her as a messenger.⁴⁸ In the Eastern Han and into the Northern and Southern Dynasties, the hare, toad, and sunbird joined the nine-tailed fox in the Queen Mother of the West’s impressive train of courtiers, her flamboyant immortal bestiary.⁴⁹

The solar crow, the Queen Mother’s avian messenger, also played a prominent role in Wu Zhao’s court. Miscellaneous Records of the Taiping Era includes the following story:

Aware of the great political currency invested in auspicious omens, men vied to present Wu Zhao with sunbirds and other such tokens that, broadcast properly, announced heaven’s endorsement of her rule. Such presentations, of course, also afforded these men a path of rapid career advancement.

There is further evidence that Wu Zhao consciously augmented her political luster with images of celestial illumination: Three of the twelve new characters created for Wu Zhao in 689 upon the inauguration of the Origin of Records reign era—“sun”

, “moon” 囝, and her invented name Zhao 曌—reflect a conscious effort on Wu Zhao’s part to, like the Queen Mother of the West, affiliate herself with both celestial bodies.⁵¹

In 697, according to Shi Anchang’s investigation of funerary epitaphs and other inscriptions, the character for moon changed from 囝 to

.⁵² In appearance, the character chu 出 resembles a crouching animal, such as the moon’s traditional inhabitants, the hare or the toad. This creature parallels the solar crow, found in the new character for sun.⁵³ The toad is pressed flat, legs splayed to the sides. In this character can be discerned an effort by Wu Zhao to draw on a deeply ingrained mythological tradition, to associate herself with the Queen Mother or, perhaps, Chang E, the goddess of the moon, who oversaw the efforts of the lunar toad and jade hare to brew the elixir of immortality.

The sunbird and the new characters for “sun” and “moon” were part of Wu Zhao’s deliberate composition of a repertoire of common symbols she shared with the Queen Mother of the West. These characters became unique signets of Wu Zhao’s imperial sovereignty, symbols indelibly imprinting her image on language. They appeared in many guises—as part of the state calendar, as representations of celestial bodies, and as signs to remind ministers of her authority. The solar crow and the lunar denizens were familiar motifs, and those in Wu Zhao’s court viewing edicts bearing the new characters at once understood the consonance between their female ruler and the Queen Mother.

When Wu Zhao, in her mid-sixties, became emperor, she took great pains to project immutability. Like any emperor, Wu Zhao was deeply preoccupied with her mortality and strove to broadcast an image of vitality, timelessness, and agelessness. A wizened, toothless crone does not project the image of a potent, charismatic leader. In a concerted effort to conceal her mortal blemishes, her wrinkles and creases, Wu Zhao, like many Tang women, expertly applied powders, rouges, creams, ointments, mascara, and oils to disguise the ravages of time.⁵⁵ Her secular power was buttressed by the sense that the sovereign was, like the Queen Mother, otherworldly, not beholden to the same limits of space and time as other mortals. She linked her physical self to the state ritual calendar, tying the inauguration of the Protracted Longevity era in 692 to her personal rejuvenation:

In 700, Wu Zhao’s inauguration of the Distant Vision era celebrated the good health and longevity of the seventy-six-year-old female emperor:

The grand dowager commissioned Hongzhou monk Hu Chao to concoct a longevity potion. After three years it was completed, wasting millions of cash in the process. When the grand dowager imbibed it, the process of aging seemed to reverse itself. On gui-chou [27 May 700], she declared an empire-wide amnesty and changed the reign name to Distant Vision.⁵⁷

“Distant vision” comes from Daoist savant Laozi: “When a ruler possesses the mother of the state, he can then endure. This is the way of distant vision and longevity, of deep roots and firm stems, by which one lives to see many days.”⁵⁸ “Distant vision” means never growing old, maintaining clear wit and perspicacity. Wu Zhao’s rejuvenation occasioned the change of a reign era and a five-day congratulatory feast, at which her subjects raised many a cup to toast her long life and good health.⁵⁹

In the last seven or eight years of Wu Zhao’s life, she turned—as so many Chinese rulers did in senescence—toward Daoism in an aggressive quest for immortality.⁶⁰ In Shaping the Lotus Sutra, Eugene Wang observes that Wu Zhao’s growing obsession with prolonging her life played a part in her growing interest in Daoism in the post-695 period.⁶¹

Under Wu Zhao, the Queen Mother of the West became closely identified with Mount Song, the Central Peak of the Five Marchmounts, located close to the female ruler’s political center, Luoyang. Mount Song’s emergence as a ritual center was made manifest as early as the first lunar month of 683, when, on an outing to a newly completed mountain palace on the slopes of the Central Marchmount, Wu Zhao and ailing Gaozong sent emissaries to offer sacrifices at the nearby shrine devoted to the Queen Mother of the West.62 For the “Two Sages,” such a sacrifice enhanced the sense that their summer palace in the crags of Mount Song was a tribute to and localized manifestation of the legendary supernal mountain aerie of the Queen Mother of the West. As grand dowager, Wu Zhao designated Mount Song the Divine Peak.⁶³

A verse of legendary Tang poet Li Bo (701–762) further illustrates that in the imagined topography of the Tang, Mount Song was transformed into a Daoist fantasia. To commemorate the ordination of Wu Zhao’s granddaughter, Princess Jade Verity (Yuzhen gongzhu 玉真公主, 692–762), as a Daoist priestess, he envisioned that:

A second mountain in the region was also associated with the Queen Mother of the West. Situated even closer to Luoyang, Mount Goushi was a short, flat-topped hill thirty kilometers west of the imposing Mount Song. In Du Guangting’s biography of the Queen Mother, he records that “the Queen Mother was born at the Yi River [near Luoyang] in the Divine Continent (Shenzhou 神洲) [China]. Her surname was Gou 緱,”⁶⁵ the same as that of Mount Goushi.

Du Guangting’s work also contains a biography of the Immortal Maiden of the Gou clan, who shared a surname with the Queen Mother and heralded from Southern Marchmount, Hengshan. In her nineties, this maiden was cultivating the dao in dangerous wilderness solitude at the altar of famous Daoist Wei Huacun, who sent her a long-tailed, talking green bird with a red-capped head, which resembled a mourning dove. This messenger bird informed the Immortal Maiden of Gou that “The surname of the Queen Mother of the West was Gou. . . . In Henan there is a Mount Goushi. That was where she cultivated the dao.”66 In all likelihood, this connection between the Daoist goddess and Mount Gou prompted Han Wudi, so intimately connected in myth and legend with the Queen Mother, to stop at Mount Gou in 110 B.C.⁶⁷

In the seventh month of 675, when Wu Zhao’s eldest son, Crown Prince Li Hong, was buried in the vicinity of Mount Goushi, Goushi County was established.⁶⁸ By the Tang, these sources attest, the Queen Mother was identified with more readily accessible local sites like Mount Goushi and Mount Song, in addition to faraway Kunlun.

Perhaps the greatest influence the Queen Mother of the West exerted on Wu Zhao is evidenced in the emergent cult of Prince Jin (Wangzi Jin or Wangzi Qiao, c. sixth century B.C.), the son of Eastern Zhou ruler King Ling (r. 571–545 B.C.), during the later stages of Wu Zhao’s tenure as emperor.⁶⁹ In Daoist lore, Prince Jin had risen from a recluse to an “ageless demigod.”⁷⁰ Disgusted with his father’s maladministration—to protect the royal palaces in Luoyang, King Ling planned to dam the rivers, diverting the floodwaters eastward to submerge the dwellings of the common people—Prince Jin remonstrated, and was banished. In the end, however, King Ling’s plans were not implemented, and the cast-off prince became a folk hero. This high-minded noble became an ascetic, playing a flute as he roamed the Yi and Luo river valleys in exile. Lord Fuqiu, a wandering immortal, taught Prince Jin the art of crane riding, a skill usually reserved for spirits and divinities. Finally, from the bald crown of Mount Goushi, Prince Jin ascended to become an immortal, taking leave of his contrite father, the Zhou court, and adoring throngs on the seventh day of the seventh lunar month, spiraling skyward on a red-capped crane to join the company of Daoist gods above. On the site where Prince Jin departed, King Ling erected an Ascended Immortal Observatory (Shengxian guan 升仙觀). Shrines were erected to Prince Jin both on Mount Song and on Mount Goushi.⁷¹ Two of the peaks on the Greater Room of Mount Song are called Zijin, after Prince Jin, and Fuqiu, after his Daoist immortal instructor.⁷² Over time, a regional cult of Prince Jin developed; he emerged as a local tutelary divinity.⁷³

Once Wu Zhao became emperor, Mount Song loomed even larger. In early 696, she performed the sacrosanct feng and shan rites on the Divine Peak.74 Shortly thereafter, on the equinox, she honored the deity of Mount Song as Emperor of the Center of Heaven and elevated Prince Jin to become Ascended Immortal Prince (Shengxian taizi 升仙太子). On her return trip to the Divine Capital, she stopped by Mount Goushi and, seeing the shrine devoted to Prince Jin in a state of disrepair, ordered it restored and named Temple of the Ascended Immortal Prince.⁷⁵

En route to Mount Song in the first month of 699, Wu Zhao once again sojourned at the temple on Mount Goushi.⁷⁶ Beside the temple she had established several years earlier, she ordered the erection of a commemorative stele dedicated to Prince Jin. The elegant strokes of the stele’s title characters are a series of beautiful, ornate birds.⁷⁷ Wu Zhao composed a preface to the stele that celebrates the efficacy of the dao and the auspicious geomancy of Mount Goushi. The preface includes a history of Prince Jin and proofs that heaven endorses her Zhou dynasty.⁷⁸

It is beyond the scope of this book to exhaustively analyze the implications of this rich and important work upon Daoism, but several sections warrant particular attention. Wu Zhao begins her benediction upon the blessed ground of Mount Goushi by imagining a host of immortals setting out from the west gate of Luoyang and paying homage to the Queen Mother of the West. There are other intimations of the Queen Mother: in the section on Wu Zhao’s decision to restore the Daoist immortal’s temple, she mentions that the year before she composed the inscription, she sent an emissary to Mount Goushi to offer a sacrifice to Prince Jin. On the very day the rite was performed, the strains of an immortal’s flute, like the mellifluous call of a phoenix, could be heard from the distant heavens; an immortal astride a red-capped crane descended from on high, no doubt Prince Jin offering his thanks.⁷⁹

To understand Wu Zhao’s sudden interest in the cult of this lesser Daoist immortal and its connection to her worship of the Queen Mother of the West, it is important to look at the emergence of two favorites in her court, Zhang Yizhi and Zhang Changzong. According to the Sui manual of the sexual arts, the Prescriptions from the Heart of Medicine (Yixinfang 醫心方)—citing an earlier text, the Secret Instructions of the Jade Chamber (Yufang bijue 玉房秘訣)—the Queen Mother of the West secured her everlasting youth through nurturing her yin essence by copulating with young boys.80 Septuagenarian Wu Zhao, influenced by the Daoist notion that young male yang essence could rejuvenate old female yin essence, summoned Zhang Changzong and Zhang Yizhi into her inner quarters in 697. These dashing brothers, skilled in music and well-versed in poetry, accoutered in colorful silks and wearing vermilion rouge, rapidly emerged as Wu Zhao’s male favorites. Soon court officials served as personal valets for the Zhangs’ mothers; and Wu Zhao’s kinsmen addressed the Zhangs reverently as “Fifth Master” (Wulang 五郎) and “Sixth Master” (Liulang 六郎), all the while vying for the honor of stabling their horses.⁸¹ In 698, Wu Zhao set up the Institute for Reining Cranes (Konghejian 控鶴監), with Zhang Yizhi as director.⁸²

The significance of this new office, Reining Cranes, soon became apparent. In 700, Wu Zhao’s nephew Wu Sansi (d. 707), the prince of Liang, proclaimed that Zhang Changzong was the incarnation of Prince Jin. Thereafter, Wu Zhao ordered that Zhang Changzong don a feathered garment, play a flute, and prance around the court astride a wooden crane.⁸³ The feathered raiment may well have been the extraordinary “flock of kingfishers” cloak (Jicuiqiu 集翠裘) worth “more than a thousand gold” presented at Wu Zhao’s court by emissaries from Guangzhou (Nanhai commandery 南海郡), a garment she bestowed upon Zhang Changzong.⁸⁴

In his obsequious effort to further exalt Zhang Changzong, Wu Sansi wrote the “Verse of the Immortal Cranes” (Xianhe pian 仙鶴篇), which included the lines:

Both Duke Fuqiu and Ding Lingwei are Daoist immortals. The “archivist” refers to Laozi himself. And Huainan is Daoist loremaster Liu An. Luoyang is depicted as a Daoist paradise, drawing cranes from nearby mountains. The ultimate point Cui Rong establishes in this poem is the extended conceit that the cumulative Daoist incense churned up by the polychrome crane wings of Zhang Changzong in the guise of Prince Jin perfumed not the ousted Tang dynasts associated with Laozi but Wu Zhao in her incarnation as Queen Mother of the West.

A body of literary masters including Song Zhiwen and Li Qiao—members of the Institute for Reining Cranes—produced the 1300-chapter Pearls and Blossoms of the Three Faiths (Sanjiao zhuying 三教珠英), an anthology that sought to systemically gather an encyclopedia of Buddhist, Daoist, and Confucian wisdom. Because of the rumors swirling around the institute, however, many argued the project was little more than an elaborate diversion to cover the riotous carousing, boisterous feasting, and other lascivious goings-on in the inner palace, a transparent effort to squelch the cacophony of criticism from the court.⁸⁹

The emergence of Mount Goushi as a ritual center, associated with both Prince Jin and the Queen Mother of the West, can be understood in terms of Wu Zhao’s ongoing effort to transform greater Luoyang into sanctified ground connected to her imperial person and indelibly imprinted with her image. The rising cult of Prince Jin signaled a shift in Wu Zhao’s imperial favor from Buddhist utopias, in the first half of her Zhou dynasty, to Daoist paradises during her later years.

In 698, Wu Zhao made her son Li Xiǎn (the once and future emperor Zhongzong), heir apparent once again. This decision effectively signaled her intention to return the empire to the house of Tang.90 Rather than deal with the constant pressures of her dissension-ridden court, in her later years Wu Zhao retreated to her mountain villas or indulged in the flamboyant gaiety the Zhangs provided in her inner quarters.

This desire to remove herself from the infighting and factionalism of her court is reflected in her poem “Shizong” (“Stony Torrents”) written in 700:

In her tone, one readily detects Wu Zhao’s escapist delight in the comforting vastness of the mountains and dales south of Luoyang. Stony Torrents is a gorge near Mount Song. On the same outing, Wu Zhao commanded those in her entourage to write poems to commemorate the occasion. Not only did Wu Sansi cast Zhang Changzong as Prince Jin in his “Verse of the Immortal Crane,” but he also tacitly elevated his aunt Wu Zhao to the station of a Daoist immortal.

Elsewhere in the poem, he mentions, as one of the crane’s destinations, “Green Fields” (Qingtian 青田), one of the thirty-six lesser grotto-heavens in Daoism, located on a mountain in Zhejiang.⁹³ Similarly, Li Qiao’s poem “Crane” (he 鶴) features a crane, presumably ridden by a Daoist immortal, soaring from “Green Fields” to the “Vermilion Within” (Danjin 丹禁) of the imperial palaces.⁹⁴ And if Zhang Changzong was Prince Jin, then who in the Daoist pantheon could Wu Zhao be other than the Queen Mother of the West?

Suzanne Cahill has illustrated that on this famous outing to Shizong, poet-courtier Yao Chong (650–721)95 drew upon images like King Mu of Zhou’s “westward procession culminating in a supernatural feast,” in order to transform Wu Zhao’s entourage into a company of Daoist immortals. Yao Chong’s poem on the occasion indicates that Wu Zhao excelled two rulers of the past with whom the Queen Mother of the West was closely intertwined, King Mu and Han Wudi:

The poem of favorite Zhang Yizhi commemorating the outing to Stony Torrents more explicitly linked his patroness to the Queen Mother:

Wu Zhao’s desire to associate herself with the Queen Mother of the West was most readily apparent in her later years: in her establishment of the Institute of Reining Cranes, in the development of Mount Goushi into a cultic center for Prince Jin, in Zhang Changzong’s theatrical portrayal of this crane-riding Daoist immortal, and in her recurring role as Queen Mother of the West in the poetry of her courtiers. Assuming the part only after she had ceded the empire back to her son, she played the Queen Mother of the West to Zhang Changzong’s Prince Jin. Seemingly, this role as the Queen Mother of the West functionally did little to amplify her political authority and, indeed, might better be understood as a playful diversion during her waning years.

Imperial poetry outings like the picnic to Stony Torrents continued after Wu Zhao’s deposal and death in the court under uxorious Zhongzong and his empress Wei in the Jinglong 景龍 era (5 October 707 to 4 July 710). Jia Jinhua has noted that, continuing a tradition from Wu Zhao’s court, poet-officials “took poetry as a political tool whereby they obtained favor from the emperor, empress, and other members of the royal house in order to gain high political position in court.”100 While Zhongzong’s puissant spouse Empress Wei was identified with the Queen Mother of the West less frequently than Wu Zhao, on an outing to Xingqing Pool, courtier Zhao Yanzhao wrote the following verse on her behalf:

Through sericulture rites, jade tokens of authority, phoenixes, and lunisolar radiance, Wu Zhao linked herself to the Queen Mother of the West. These culturally legible symbols identified Wu Zhao with the potent Daoist goddess, amplifying her authority with the divinity’s mythic aura. In her final years of rule, attended by the flamboyant Zhang brothers, Wu Zhao styled her inner palace a Daoist paradise on earth, over which she presided as Queen Mother of the West. This colorful theater, while it may have served as a welcome distraction from her factionalized court, did little to rekindle the fading power of her Zhou dynasty.