INTRODUCTION
1. While in most secondary scholarship she is known as Wu Zetian 武則天 or Empress Wu 武后, throughout this work I use the self-styled designation Wu Zhao she assumed in 689. For historical records of her assumption of the name Zhao, see Zizhi tongjian [Comprehensive Mirror for the Advancement of Governance], comp. Sima Guang (Beijing: Zhonghua, 1995), 204.6263 (hereafter ZZTJ); and Xin Tang shu [New History of the Tang], comp. Ouyang Xiu (Beijing: Zhonghua, 1997), 76.3481 (hereafter XTS).
Throughout this work, depending on the juncture of her half-century political career, I refer to Wu Zhao as empress, grand dowager, or emperor. When speaking in general terms, I call her “emperor.” She has earned this designation. See also “Titles at Different Stages of Wu Zhao’s Career.”
2. For a study on the obstacles Wu Zhao faced in her ascendancy to emperor, see Rebecca Doran’s excellent dissertation “Insatiable Women and Transgressive Authority: Constructions of Gender and Power in Early Tang China” (Harvard University, 2011). Doran illustrates how female political power in traditional China was consistently—through successive constructions and reconstructions of Confucian narratives—identified with deviousness, greed, and hypersexuality; these intense, deep-seated male fears developed into a well-established tradition that systematically delegitimized Wu Zhao and other powerful Tang women, transforming them into caricatures of lawlessness and evil, “remembered primarily in terms of excess, cruelty, vapid symbolism, and dalliance with much younger male consorts” (7). Played out for more than a millennium, this “negative ‘canonization’” (28) makes it difficult to look at the actual construction and nature of the female sovereign’s political authority. See also Guo Shaolin, “Lun guren de Wu Zetian diwei guan” [A Discussion of Wu Zetian’s Position from the Perspective of the Ancients], in Sui-Tang Luoyang [Sui and Tang Luoyang] (Xi’an: Sanqin, 2006), 263–75.
3. Zhao Fengjie, Zhongguo funü zai falüshang zhi diwei [The Position of Women in Chinese Law] (Shanghai: Shangwu, 1927), 111, translation by Yang Lien-sheng in “Female Rulers in Imperial China,” Harvard Journal of Asian Studies 23 (1960–61): 50.
4. Victor Turner, The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-structure (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1969), vii and 128.
5. This is not to suggest that male rulers did not look beyond the purview of Confucian tradition for legitimation. For instance, Taizong styled himself a Central Asian Heavenly Qaghan (Tian kehan 天可汗) as well as a Chinese/Confucian Son of Heaven. See Pan Yihong, Son of Heaven and the Heavenly Qaghan: Sui-Tang China and Its Neighbors (Bellingham: Western Washington University Press, 1997); and Marc Abramson, Ethnic Identity in Tang China (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008), chap. 5. The primary point is that conception of emperorship naturally evolved with the increasingly complex ideological and ethnic composition of the empire.
6. Jiu Tang shu [Old Tang History], comp. Liu Xu (Beijing: Zhonghua, 1997), 84.2799 (hereafter JTS). These are the words of official Hao Chujun, recorded in his biography.
7. JTS 67.2491; see also note 9 below. This oath is included in the biography of Li Jingye, the chief rebel in the uprising against grand dowager–regent Wu Zhao in 684. For more on Luo Binwang, see Volker Klöpsch, “Lo Pin-wang’s Survival: Traces of a Legend,” T’ang Studies 6 (1988): 77–97. Luo Binwang did not make it to the end of the year.
8. It is impossible in a footnote to do justice to Confucius or Confucianism. As Mario Poceski observes in Introducing Chinese Religions (New York: Routledge, 2009), “For over two millennia the Confucian tradition occupied a central position and exerted significant influence on various spheres of life in China, including politics, culture, society and religion” (34). Still, some explanation of what is meant by “Confucian” in this work is necessary. Based on the teachings of the Eastern Zhou sage Confucius (551–479 B.C.) from Lu (modern-day Shandong), Confucian thought (or Confucianism) was an ethical system, an ideology that reinforced, in state and family (in political and social principle), the normative authority and rectitude of hierarchy. Confucius famously offered the following counsel to a regional ruler who asked him about the art of governance: “Let the ruler be ruler, the subject a subject; the father a father, the son a son” (slightly altered from The Analects, Confucius, trans. D.C. Lau (New York: Penguin, 1979), 114, XII.11. In essence, know your role! This vision of harmony and order drawn from hierarchy is reflected in the five Confucian relationships (wu lun 五倫): the minister shall be unswervingly loyal to the ruler; the son shall be duly filial to the father; the younger brother shall embrace the elder with fraternal spirit; the wife shall submit to and obey the husband; and friends shall treat one another with reciprocal kindness. The idea that the female is subordinate to the male is concomitant with the very core of this ideology. Confucius is often attributed authorship of many of the Five Classics (Book of Songs, Book of Changes, Book of History, Book of Rites, and The Spring and Autumn Annals). He is also credited with composing the Doctrine of the Mean and the Greater Learning. Perhaps the sage is best known for his Analects, fragments of his wisdom collected by disciples and immortalized. Confucius honored the past. In this canonical matrix, Yao, Shun, Yu, King Wen, King Wu, and the Duke of Zhou—the illustrious company of long-honored political ancestors—are time and again exalted and upheld as cultural heroes and exemplars.
9. Quan Tangwen [Complete Anthology of Tang Prose], comp. Dong Gao (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1996), 199.2009–10 (hereafter QTW). Luo Binwang’s polemic also appears in JTS 67.2490–91 and is excerpted in ZZTJ 203.6421–22.
10. ZZTJ 203.6442. This admonishment came from court minister Yuwen Jun.
11. XTS 4.87–88, 34.880, 889; Taiping guangji [Miscellaneous Records of the Taiping Era], comp. Li Fang (Beijing: Zhonghua, 1996), 463.3785, 361.2866–67 (hereafter TPGJ). These fowl were the invention of Song Confucians. They do not appear in the Old Tang History. These chickens were a culturally legible reference to the famous quote in the “Speech at Mu” in the Book of History, where it is written, “When the hen crows to greet the dawn, the family is doomed.”
12. To coin a phrase from Yang Lien-sheng, “Female Rulers in Imperial China,” 48.
14. David Keightley, “The Making of Ancestors: Late Shang Religion and Its Legacy,” in Religion and Chinese Society, vol. 1, Ancient and Medieval China, ed. John Lagerway (Hong Kong: Chinese University Press, 2004), 41–42. Keightley divides the Shang gods into six groups, three that might be considered shared with other peoples (nature spirits like the river deity He, Former Lords like Wang Hai, and the high god Di) and three that were connected to the Shang royal family.
15. Kwang-chih Chang, Art, Myth and Ritual (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1983), 107.
16. C. K. Yang, Religion in Chinese Society (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967), 29.
17. Herrlee Creel, The Birth of China (New York: Frederick Ungar, 1961), 175–80.
18. Wang Aihe, Cosmology and Political Culture in Early China (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 60.
19. Richard Bendix, Kings or People: Power and the Mandate to Rule (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), 53.
20. Constance Cook, “Ancestor Worship During the Eastern Zhou,” in Early Chinese Religion, part 1, Shang Through Han (1250 BC–220 AD), ed. John Lagerway and Mark Kalinowski (Leiden: Brill, 2009), 238.
21. Martin Kern, “Announcements from Mountains: The Stele Inscriptions of the First Emperor,” in Conceiving the Empire: China and Rome Compared, ed. Fritz Heimer-Muschler and Achim Mittag (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 233–34.
22. Wang Aihe, Cosmology and Political Culture, 207.
23. Modified based on Confucius, The Analects, 66, II.23.
24. Beishi [History of the Northern Dynasties], comp. Li Yanshou (Beijing: Zhonghua, 1997), 9.330–36 (hereafter BS).
25. Howard Wechsler, Offerings of Jade and Silk: Ritual and Symbol in the Legitimization of the T’ang (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985), ix–x and 95–104. For more on the development and patronage of the cult of Confucius in the early Tang, see also John Shryock, The Origin and Development of the State Cult of Confucius (New York: Paragon), 131–36. Shryock notes the expansion of the cult of Confucius under Taizong. By his imperial order, every prefecture and district established a Confucian temple. In addition, worship extended to a broader range of Confucian disciples, whose tablets were set in these temples. During the early Tang, though both worthies were honored, there was an ongoing dispute among courtier officials as to whether Confucius or the Duke of Zhou was more deserving of the posthumous title Foremost Sage (xian sheng 先聖). See also XTS 15.373–74.
26. For more on this incident, see Andrew Eisenberg, “Kingship, Power and the Hsuan-wu Men Incident of the T’ang,” T’oung Pao 80 (1994): 223–59.
27. Translation drawn from Denis Twitchett, “How to Be an Emperor: T’ang T’ai-tsung’s Vision of His Role,” Asia Major, Third Series, 9, no. 1–2 (1996): 18–19; cf. Wenyuan yinghua [Flowers and Blossoms of the Garden of Literature], comp. Li Fang (Beijing: Zhonghua, 1982), 360.1845–46 (hereafter WYYH). I have slightly modified the translation and changed Wade-Giles to pinyin.
28. Twitchett, “How to Be an Emperor,” 8n5.
29. Jack Chen, “The Writing of Imperial Poetry in Medieval China,” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 65, no. 1 (2005): 57.
31. Quan Tangshi [Complete Anthology of Tang Poetry], comp. Peng Dingqiu (Beijing: Zhonghua, 1995), 1.4 (hereafter QTS), translation by Chen in “The Writing of Imperial Poetry,” 90.
32. Shi ji, comp. Sima Qian (Beijing: Zhonghua, 1995), 4.112 (hereafter SJ). See chap. 5 of this volume for more on Hou Ji.
33. Chen, “The Writing of Imperial Poetry,” 97.
34. Translation by Twitchett in “How to Be an Emperor,” 53–55. I have changed Wade-Giles to pinyin. The Difan was initially brought back by the Japanese embassies from Tang China. Twitchett’s translation is from a Japanese version printed in Kyoto in 1668 and officially republished by the Tokugawa bakufu in 1830 (Twitchett, 48).
35. Jiang Yonglin, The Mandate of Heaven and the Great Ming Code (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2011), 78.
36. Mark Lewis, China’s Cosmopolitan Empire: The Tang Dynasty (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2009), 226.
37. Mircea Eliade, Myth and Reality (New York: Harper and Row, 1963), 13–15.
41. Elias Canetti, Crowds and Power, trans. Carol Stewart (New York: Seabury, 1978), 397.
42. ZZTJ 204.6467. The nature and purpose of Wu Zhao’s fictive kin ties with the dynastic founders of the original Zhou dynasty are addressed in chaps. 5 and 6 in this volume.
44. XTS 6.120, 76.3481; ZZTJ 204.6263–64; QTW 96.996.
45. ZZTJ 204.6462. See also XTS 4.89, 36.559; JTS 6.120.
47. For the establishment of the Northern Zhou, see BS 9.330–36. After the fall of the Tang, during the tumultuous Five Dynasties, Guo Wei established another ephemeral Zhou dynasty (951–960).
48. XTS 4.91, 15.374. For annual sacrifices, descendants of these cultural worthies were enfeoffed with 100 households each.
49. Wang Aihe, Cosmology and Political Culture, 208.
50. Wechsler, Offerings of Jade and Silk, 234.
51. David McMullen, “Bureaucrats and Cosmology: The Ritual Code of T’ang China,” in Rituals of Royalty: Power and Ceremonial in Traditional Societies, ed. David Cannadine and Simon Price (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 186.
52. John Lagerway, Taoist Ritual in Chinese Society and History (New York: Macmillan, 1987), 254. For an overview on Daoism’s ongoing role as an “official religion of the state” in traditional China (253), see chap. 15, “Taoism and Political Legitimacy.”
53. Livia Kohn, “Lord Lao and Laojun,” in The Routledge Encyclopedia of Taoism, ed. Fabrizio Predagio (New York: Routledge, 2011), 613–15.
54. Anna Seidel, “The Image of the Perfect Ruler in Early Taoist Messianism: Laozi and Li Hung,” History of Religions 9 (1969–1970): 216–22. In The Emergence of Daoism: Creation of Tradition (New York: Routledge, 2012), qualifying this vision of Daoist kingship in the Han, Gil Raz has examined a stele erected during the reign of emperor Huandi (r. A.D. 147–67) with an inscription revealing that although the Daoist sage at that juncture enjoyed “divine status as the embodiment of the dao,” he was not yet revered as a “cosmic god”; he was regarded as a superhuman adept, a perfect model for the ultimate practitioner, the emperor (878–79).
55. For more on Kou Qianzhi’s potent Daoist influence on the Northern Wei, see Richard Mather, “K’ou Ch’ien-chih and the Taoist Theocracy of the Northern Wei,” in Facets of Taoism: Essays in Chinese Religion, ed. Holmes Welch and Anna Seidel (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979), 103–22; and Julia Ching, Mysticism and Kingship in China (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 222. See also Seidel, “The Image of the Perfect Ruler,” 242; Lagerway, Taoist Ritual, 255; and Livia Kohn, “Kou Qianzhi,” in Predagio, The Routledge Encyclopedia of Taoism, 601–02.
56. Peter Nickerson, “The Southern Celestial Masters,” in Daoism Handbook, ed. Livia Kohn (Leiden: Brill, 2004), 258–60.
57. Livia Kohn, Daoist Mystical Philosophy: The Scripture of Western Ascension (Magdalena, N.Mex.: Three Pines, 2007), 164; Lagerway, Taoist Ritual, 256.
58. For more on the role of the divine Lord Lao in the founding and legitimation of the Tang, see Seidel, “The Image of the Perfect Ruler,” 244; and Woodbridge Bingham, Founding of the Tang Dynasty (New York: Octagon, 1970), 118. See also chap. 9 in part III of this work.
59. Franciscus Verellen, “Liturgy and Sovereignty: The Role of Taoist Ritual and the Foundation of the Shu Kingdom (907–925),” Asia Major, Third Series, 2, no. 1 (1989): 59.
60. Timothy Barrett, Taoism Under the T’ang (London: Wellsweep, 1996), 20.
61. Tang huiyao [Essential Institutions of the Tang], comp. Wang Pu (Beijing: Zhonghua, 1998), 50.865 (hereafter THY).
62. Russell Kirkland and Livia Kohn, “Daoism in the Tang (618–907),” in Kohn, Daoism Handbook, 340.
63. For more on the cakravartin tradition, see Gu Zhengmei, “Wu Zetian de Huayan jing fowang chuantong yu Fojiao xingxiang” [Wu Zetian’s Flower Garland Sutra Tradition of Buddhist Kingship and Buddhist Imagery], Guoxue yanjiu 7 (2000): 279–321; Chen Jinhua, Monks and Monarchs, Kinship and Kingship: Tanqian in Sui Buddhism and Politics (Kyoto: Italian School of East Asian Studies, 2002), 114–15.
64. Stanley Tambiah, “The Galactic Polity in Southeast Asia,” in Culture, Thought and Social Action, ed. Stanley Tambiah (Cambridge: Harvard University, 1985), 255–56.
65. Scott Pearce, “A King’s Two Bodies: The Northern Wei Emperor Wencheng and Representations of the Power of His Monarchy,” Frontiers of History in China 7, no. 1 (2012): 101–02.
66. Erik Zürcher, The Buddhist Conquest of China (Leiden: Brill, 1972), 31.
67. Chen Jinhua, “Pañcavārṣika Assemblies in Liang Wudi’s Buddhist Palace Chapel,” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 66, no. 1 (2006): 45 and 77. See also Max Deeg, “Origins and Development of the Buddhist Pañcavārṣika, Part II: China,” Saṃbhāṣā: Nagoya Studies in Indian Culture and Buddhism 18 (1997): 76–79. Deeg refers to Liang Wudi as an Aśokan “imitator” (83). The festal pañcavārṣika is connected to ceremonies performed by the legendary King Aśoka of India, the famous Mauryan monarch who tempered his bloody conquest of a vast empire by his embrace of the Buddhist faith. In the wake of a grand tour of inspection in the third century B.C., Aśoka called for a pañcavārṣika and made a massive offering of gold and himself to the Buddhist clergy. This served the dual purpose of propagating Buddhism and celebrating his sovereignty. As John Strong contends in The Legend of King Aśoka (Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1989), “The Pañcavārṣika was thus not only an occasion on which the king, at least symbolically, gave everything (including himself) to the sangha; it was also a time when he reaffirmed his role and position as a cakravartin. It was, moreover, something that only a cakravartin could do, since it required dominion and kingship to begin with” (95). The conjoining of the secular and sacred was mutually reinforcing. Donation and charity—extensive giving of one’s self and one’s possessions—was a perfect symbolic gesture of the Mahayana ideal of compassionate self-sacrifice. Material trappings were discarded, worldly manifestations were shed in an ecstatic gesture of renunciation. In essence, the ruler became a living bodhisattva yet awakened the following morning with his secular kingship intact.
68. Deeg, “Origins and Development of the Buddhist Pañcavārṣika, Part II,” 78–80.
69. Kathy Cheng-mei Ku, “The Buddharāja Image of Emperor Wu of Liang,” in Philosophy and Religion in Early Medieval China, ed. Alan K. L. Chan and Yue-kueng Lo (Albany: SUNY Press, 2010), 265–90. Ku’s interpretation of Buddharājaship as “a Buddha who is also a cakravartin,” as she points out, differs from the understanding of previous scholars like Arthur Wright and Yan Shangwen. Yan looked at Liang Wudi’s kingship as a “combination of Buddhism, Confucianism, and Daoism.” Wright understands “Emperor-bodhisattva” (huangdi pusa 皇帝菩薩) as “a fusion of the Chinese ideal kingship or ‘sagely king’ and the Indian ideal kingship of cakravartin,” as a cultural hybrid, whereas Ku’s notion of Buddharāja stems straight from the Indian/Aśokan tradition (see Ku, 265–66 and 277). While her argument is convincing, one might contend that though Liang Wudi drew heavily on the ideological sanction of Buddharājaship, he never relinquished his claim to being a Chinese emperor; he was concurrently emperor (huangdi 皇帝) and cakravartin.
70. Victor Cunrui Xiong, Emperor Yang of the Sui Dynasty: His Life, His Times, His Legacy (Albany: SUNY Press, 2006), 151–64. For a more succinct summary of Sui Wendi’s patronage of Buddhism, see Hu Ji, “Sui Wendi yu Sui Yangdi de zhengzhi [The Politics of Sui Wendi and Sui Yangdi],” in Hu Ji wencun: Sui-Tang lishi yu Dunhuang ji [Collected Essays of Hu Ji: Volume on Sui-Tang History and Dunhuang] (Beijing: Social Sciences Press, 2004), 11.
71. Deeg, “Origins and Development of the Buddhist Pañcavārṣika, Part II,” 81.
72. Translation from Arthur Wright, The Sui Dynasty: The Unification of China, AD 581–617 (New York: Knopf, 1978), 134; cf. Guang hongmingji, 17.213b; Taisho Tripitaka, 52.2103 (hereafter T.).
73. Chen Jinhua, Monks and Monarchs; Chen Jinhua “Pañcavārṣika Assemblies,” 97.
74. See Erik Zürcher, “Prince Moonlight: Messianism and Eschatology in Early Medieval Chinese Buddhism,” T’oung Pao 68 (1982): 1–75; N. Harry Rothschild, “Emerging from the Cocoon: Ethnic Revival, Lunar Radiance, and the Cult of Liu Sahe in the Jihu Uprising of 682–683,” Annali 65 (2005): 275–76; Stanley Weinstein, Buddhism Under the T’ang (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 6–7.
75. Kenneth Ch’en, Buddhism in China (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1964), 172.
76. Sarah Milledge Nelson, Gender in Archaeology: Analyzing Power and Prestige (Walnut Creek, CA: Altamira, 1997), 19.
77. Stephen R. Bokenkamp, “A Medieval Feminist Critique of the Chinese World Order: The Case of Wu Zhao (r. 690–705),” Religion 28 (1998): 384.
78. Edward Schafer, The Divine Woman: Dragon Ladies and Rain Maidens (North Point: San Francisco, 1980), 188.
80. Antonino Forte, Political Propaganda and Ideology in China at the End of the Seventh Century: Inquiry into the Nature, Authors and Function of Dunhuang Document S. 6502 Followed by an Annotated Translation, 2nd ed. (Kyoto: Italian School of East Asian Studies, 2005), 262.
81. There are not any comprehensive studies on the relationship between Wu Zhao and her larger pantheon of female political ancestors, but there are several essays that shed light on her relationship with specific female divinities. For more on Wu Zhao and the Luo River goddess, see Li Zhao, “Lun Wu Zetian bai Luo shoutu yu Luoshen de bianyi” [A Discussion of the Evolution of the Luo River Goddess and Wu Zetian’s Worship of the Luo and Receiving the Chart], in Wu Zetian yu Shendu Luoyang, ed. Wang Shuanghuai and Guo Shaolin (Beijing: China Cultural History Press, 2008), 74–83; and Stephan Kory, “A Remarkably Resonant and Resilient Tang-Dynasty Augural Stone: Empress Wu’s Baotu,” T’ang Studies 26 (2008): 99–124. For Wu Zhao’s relationship with the Mother of Qi, see Jonathan Pettit, “The Erotic Empress: Fantasy and Sovereignty in Chinese Temple Inscriptions,” T’ang Studies 26 (2008): 125–42. Neither this list nor any of the subsequent lists is intended to be exhaustive.
82. Such studies exist: though never comprehensively, scholars have addressed many of these variables in the construction of Wu Zhao’s authority. For gender politics in Tang China, see Chen Jo-shui, “Empress Wu and Proto-Feminist Sentiments in T’ang China,” in Imperial Rulership and Cultural Change in Traditional China, ed. Frederick Brandauer and Chih-chieh Huang (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1994), 77–114; Duan Tali, Tangdai funü diwei yanjiu [Research on the Position of Women in the Tang Dynasty] (Beijing: Renmin, 2000); Jowen R. Tong, Fables for the Patriarchs: Gender Politics in Tang Discourse (Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 2000); Gao Shiyu, “A Fixed State of Affairs and Mis-positioned Status: Gender Relations in Sui, Tang, and Five Dynasties,” in The Chalice and the Blade in Chinese Culture, ed. Min Jiayin (Beijing: Academy of Social Sciences, 1995), 270–314; Bokenkamp, “A Medieval Feminist Critique”; Diana Paul, “Empress Wu and the Historians: A Tyrant and a Saint of Classical China,” in Unspoken Worlds: Women’s Religious Lives in Non-Western Cultures, ed. Nancy Falk and Rita Gross (San Francisco: Harper Collins, 1979), 191–206; Jennifer Jay, “Imagining Matriarchy: ‘Kingdoms of Women’ in Tang China,” Journal of the American Oriental Society 116 (1996): 220–29; Jay, “Vignettes of Chinese Women in Tang Xi’an (618–906): Individualism in Wu Zetian, Yang Guifei, Yu Xuanji, and Li Wa,” Chinese Culture 31, no. 1 (1990): 77–89.
83. Without doubt, these new currents and cultural flux enabled women of seventh-century China to enjoy a more prominent social presence, greater sexual freedom, and more political influence. For the influence of Indian and Central Asian cultures on sexuality in Tang China, see Bernard Faure, The Red Thread: Buddhist Approaches to Sexuality (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998); and Robert van Gulik, Sexual Life in Ancient China (Leiden: Brill, 1961).
84. For more on the free-flowing and cosmopolitan nature of early Tang China, see Sen Tansen, Buddhism, Diplomacy and Trade (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2003); Lewis, China’s Cosmopolitan Empire; Liu Xinru, Silk and Religion: An Exploration of Material Life and the Thought of People, 600–1200 (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1996); N. Harry Rothschild, “Rhetoric, Ritual and Support Constituencies in the Political Authority of Wu Zhao, China’s Only Woman Emperor” (PhD diss., Brown University, 2003), subchapter “Creating a Spiritual Capital in Keeping with the Late Seventh Century Zeitgeist: Greater Luoyang as the Hub of Wu Zhao’s Cosmopolitan Empire,” 66–82; Hu Ji, Hu Ji wencun: Sui-Tang lishi yu Dunhuang ji.
85. For two very different economic assessments of Wu Zhao’s era, see Wang Shuanghuai and Zhao Wenrun, Wu Zetian pingzhuan [A Critical Biography of Wu Zetian] (Xi’an: Sanqin, 1993), 230–249, a chapter titled “Developing the Economy” (Fazhan jingji 發展經濟); and Jacques Gernet, Buddhism in Chinese Society: An Economic History from the Fifth to the Tenth Centuries, trans. Franciscus Verellen (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995). See also Denis Twitchett, Financial Administration Under the T’ang Dynasty (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970).
86. For the ceremony to install the Nine Tripods in Luoyang, for instance, see Ricardo Fracasso, “The Nine Tripods of Empress Wu,” Tang China and Beyond, ed. Antonino Forte (Kyoto: Italian School of East Asian Studies, 1988), 85–96; and Rothschild, “Rhetoric, Ritual and Support Constituencies,” subchapter “Wu Zhao and the Nine Tripods.” For her performances of the feng and shan sacrifices, see Rothschild, “Rhetoric, Ritual and Support Constituencies,” 292–309. For Wu Zhao’s Buddhist pañcavārṣika, see Chen Jinhua, “Pañcavārṣika Assemblies”; Deeg, “Origins and Developments of the Pañcavārṣika, Part II”; Rothschild, “Zhuanlun wang, yishi, yu huozai: Wu Zhao yu 694 nian de wuzhedahui” [Cakravartin, Ceremony and Conflagration: Wu Zhao and the Pañcāvarṣika of 694], in Qianling wenhua yanjiu 7 (2012): 101–13. For Buddhist relic veneration ceremonies, see Chen Jinhua, Monks and Monarchs, 118–48; and Huang Chi-chiang, “Consecrating the Buddha: Legend, Lore, and History of the Imperial Relic-Veneration Ritual in the T’ang Dynasty,” Journal of Chung-hwa Institute of Buddhist Studies 11 (1998): 483–533.
87. Wu Zhao’s utilization of Buddhist statuary and iconography is one of the most widely researched aspects of her political and ideological authority. For an overview of her Buddhist statuary, see Patricia Karetzky, “Wu Zetian and Buddhist Art of the Tang Dynasty,” T’ang Studies 20–21 (2002–3): 113–71. For the construction of her Bright Halls (more of an ideological hybrid than a Buddhist structure), see Antonino Forte, Mingtang and Buddhist Utopias in the History of the Astronomical Clock: The Tower, the Statue and the Armillary Sphere Constructed by Empress Wu (Rome: Italian Institute of East Asian Studies, 1988). For other Buddhist architecture, see Yen Chuan-ying, “The Tower of Seven Jewels and Empress Wu,” National Palace Museum Bulletin, 22, no. 1 (March/April 1987): 1–16. For her constructions at Longmen, see Amy McNair, Donors of Longmen: Faith, Politics, and Patronage in Medieval Chinese Buddhist Sculpture (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2007); McNair, “Early Tang Patronage at Longmen,” Ars Orientalis 24 (1994): 65–81; McNair, ”The Fengxiansi Shrine and Longmen in the 670s,” Bulletin of Far Eastern Antiquities 68 (1996): 325–92; Gao Junping, “Shi lun Wu Zetian shiqi Longmen shiku de Mile zaoxiang” [A Discussion of Maitreya Sculpture in the Longmen Grottoes During the Era of Wu Zetian], Dunhuang xuejikan no. 2 (2006): 141–44. For Dunhuang, see Roderick Whitfield, Susan Whitfield, and Neville Agnew, Cave Temples of Mogao: Art and History on the Silk Road (Los Angeles: Getty Conservation Institute, 2000).
Tang Daoist art has been less extensively examined. See Yang Liu, “Images for the Temple: Imperial Patronage in the Development of Tang Daoist Art,” Artibus Asiae 61, no. 2 (2001): 189-261; and Suzanne Cahill, “The Moon Stopping in the Void: Daoism and the Literati Ideal in Mirrors of the Tang Dynasty,” ed. Chou Ju-hsi and Claudia Brown, Cleveland Studies in the History of Art, Vol. 9: Clarity and Luster: New Light on Bronze Mirrors in Tang and Post-Tang China, 600–1300: Papers on a Symposium on the Carter Collection of Chinese Bronze Mirrors at the Cleveland Museum of Art (Cleveland, OH: Cleveland Museum of Art, 2005), 24–40.
There are many works on Wu Zhao’s necropolis Qianling, shared with husband Gaozong; see, for instance, Chang Yuliang, Wu Zetian yu Qianling [Wu Zetian and Qianling] (Xi’an: Sanqin, 1986); and Fan Yingfeng and Liu Xiangyang, Qianling wenwu shiji shucong [A Narrative Record of the Historical Relics in the Qianling Mausoleum] (Xi’an: Shaanxi Tourism, 1987).
88. See Rothschild, “Rhetoric, Ritual and Support Constituencies,” subchapter “The Calendar,” 282–91.
89. See Barrett, The Woman Who Discovered Printing (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008).
90. See Kuranaka Susumu, Sokuten monji no kenkyu [Research on the Characters of Zetian] (Tokyo: Kanrin shobo, 1995); N. Harry Rothschild, “Drawing Antiquity in Her Own Image: The New Characters of Wu Zetian,” China Yongu: The Journal of Chinese Studies of Pusan National University 15, no. 3 (2009): 117–70; Shi Anchang, “Wu Zetian zao zi zhi ebian” [Evolution of the Characters Created by Wu Zetian], Gugong bowuyuan yuankan (1992), 58–62; Dong Zuobin and Wang Hengyu, “Tang Wuhou gaizi kao” [A Study of the Altered Characters of Tang Empress Wu], Bulletin of the Institute of History and Philology of Academia Sinica 34 (1963): 447–76; Tokiwa Daijô, “Bushû shinji no ichi kenkyû” [A Study of the New Characters of the Wu-Zhou era], Shina bukkyô no kenkyû 3 (1943): 395–430.
91. See Wang Yueting, “Wu Zetian yu nianhao” [Wu Zetian and Reign-era Names], in Wu Zetian yanjiu lunwenji [Collected Essays on Wu Zetian], ed. Zhao Wenrun and Li Yuming (Taiyuan: Shanxi guji, 1998); and N. Harry Rothschild, “An Inquiry into Reign Eras Under Wu Zhao, China’s Only Female Emperor,” Early Medieval China 12 (2006).
92. For the role that Wu Zhao’s promotion of literature and poetry played in the construction of her political authority, see Wang Shuanghuai and Zhao Wenrun, Wu Zetian pingzhuan, 268–78; Wilt Idema and Beata Grant, The Red Brush: Writing Women of Imperial China (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Asia Center, 2004), 60–66; Doran, “Insatiable Women”; Chen, “The Writing of Imperial Poetry”; Zhang Jian, “Wu Zetian shiwen fanying de zhengzhi sixiang zhuzhang” [The Political Thought of Wu Zetian as Reflected in Her Poetry and Writings], in Wu Zetian yu Luoyang [Wu Zetian and Luoyang], ed. Su Jian and Bai Xianzhang (Xi’an: Sanqin, 1993); Rothschild, “Rhetoric, Ritual and Support Constituencies,” subchapters “Wu Zhao’s Literary and Cultural Patronage,” 86–91, and “Chen Zi’ang,” 215–23; and Zhao Wenrun, “Wu Zetian yu ‘wenzhang siyou’” [Wu Zetian and the Quartet of Literary Friends], Qianling wenhua yanjiu 6 (2011): 51–59.
93. Rothschild, “Rhetoric, Ritual and Support Constituencies,” chap. 3, “Language and Power,” 83–141.
94. For more on the background of the Wu clan and Wu Zhao’s efforts to elevate her fellow Wus, see Chen Yinke, “Ji Tangdai zhi Li-Wu-Wei-Wang hunyin jituan” [A Record of the Marriage Bloc of the Li, Wu, Wei, and Wang Clans in the Tang Dynasty], Lishi yanjiu 1 (1955): 85–96; Liang Hengtang, “Tan Wu shi jiazu de qiyuan yu fanyan” [A Discussion of the Origins and Rise of the Wu Clan], in Wu Zetian yu Yanshi, ed. Zhao Wenrun and Liu Zhiqing (Yanshi: Lishi jiaoxue, 1997); Zhang Jie, “Wu Zetian yu tade Wushi zongqin” [Wu Zetian and Her Relatives from the Wu Clan], Hebei shifan daxue xuebao (1999): 114–18. On Wu Zhao’s efforts as emperor to mitigate tensions between her affinal Lis and her natal Wu clan through a series of strategic marriages and the sworn oath to maintain harmonious relations in 699 at the Bright Hall, see Wang Shuanghuai and Zhao Wenrun, Wu Zetian pingzhuan, 294–96.
95. See Niu Laiying, “Tangdai xiangrui yu wangchao zhengzhi” [Auspicious Portents and Dynastic Politics in the Tang Dynasty], in Tang wenhua yanjiu [Essays on Research in Tang Culture], ed. Zheng Xuemeng and Leng Minshu (Shanghai: Shanghai People’s Press, 1994), 535–44; Kory, “Tang-Dynasty Augural Stone”; Jie Yongqiang, “Wu Zetian yu xiangrui” [Wu Zetian and Auspicious Omens], in Zhao Wenrun and Li Yuming, Wu Zetian yanjiu lunwenji, 160–67.
96. For her uncanny ability to control the domestic uprisings against her in 684 and 688, see Wang Shuanghuai and Zhao Wenrun, Wu Zetian pingzhuan, 118–49; and Hu Ji, Wu Zetian benzhuan [Essential Biography of Wu Zetian] (Xi’an: Shaanxi Shifan daxue, 1998), 82–88 and 99–105. For Wu Zhao’s management of conflicts with foreign states, see Wang Shuanghuai and Zhao Wenrun, Wu Zetian pingzhuan, 250–67; Jonathan Skaff, Sui-Tang China and Its Turko-Mongol Neighbors (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012); Pan Yihong, Son of Heaven and the Heavenly Qaghan; Abramson, Ethnic Identity in Tang China.
97. There is a great deal of material on Wu Zhao’s relations with her non-Han subjects and on her foreign policy. For internationalization of Wu Zhao’s empire, see Zhang Naizhu, “Wu-Zhou Zhengquan yu Zhonggu huhua xianxiang guanxi zhi tansuo” [An Exploration of the Connection Between the Political Authority of the Wu-Zhou Dynasty and Internationalization in Chinese Middle Antiquity], Xibei shi di no. 4 (1992): 31–39, and his article “Cong Luoyang chutu wenwu kan Wu-Zhou zhengzhi de guojiahua qingcai” [A View of the International Cultural Background of the Politics of the Wu-Zhou Dynasty from the Unearthed Relics in Luoyang], Tang Yanjiu 8 (2002): 205–24; see also Antonino Forte, “Iranians in China: Buddhism, Zoroastrianism, and Bureaus of Commerce,” Cahiers d’Extrême-Asie 11 (1999–2000): 277–90; Chiu Ling-yeong, “Persians, Arabs and Other Nationals in Tang China,” Journal of the Hong Kong Royal Asiatic Society 13 (1973): 58–72.
For Wu Zhao’s non-Han generals, see Ma Chi, “Fanjiang yu Wu Zetian” [Non-Han Generals and the Political Authority of Wu Zetian], Xuchang shizhuan xuebao no. 4 (1991): 31–36. For foreign fund-raising to sponsor projects such as the Axis of the Sky (Tianshu), see Zhang Naizhu, “Wu-Zhou Wanguo tianshu yu Xiyu wenming” [The Wu-Zhou Axis of Sky of Myriad Nations and the Civilization of the Western Borderlands], Xibei Shidi no. 2 (1994): 44–45; Forte, Mingtang and Buddhist Utopias, 233–243; Guo Shaolin, “Da Zhou Wanguo songde tianshu kaoshi” [An Explanatory Investigation into the Axis of the Sky of Myriad Countries Exalting the Merits of the Great Zhou], Luoyang Shifan xueyuan xuebao no. 6 (2001): 73–77; N. Harry Rothschild, “The Koguryan Connection: The Quan (Yon) Family in the Establishment of Wu Zhao’s Political Authority,” China Yongu: The Journal of Chinese Studies of Pusan National University 14, no. 1 (2008): 199–234; Zhao Zhenhua, “Zhuchi jianzao Tianshu de waifan renwu yu ‘Zilai shi’” [The “Come-as-Sons Commissioner” and Foreigners Who Supported the Construction of the Axis of the Sky], in Wu Zetian yu Shendu Luoyang, 294–98.
98. For a specific case study of Wu Zhao’s complex relationship with prominent Confucian literati, see David McMullen, “The Real Judge Dee: Ti Jen-Chieh and the T’ang Restoration of 705,” Asia Major, Third Series, 6, no. 1 (1993): 1–81. For a broad perspective on Wu Zhao’s role in the larger transformation of the Confucian literati, see Peter Bol, This Culture of Ours (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1992), 76–107. For Wu Zhao’s role in reforming the selection and assessment process, see P. A. Herbert, Examine the Honest, Appraise the Able, Faculty of Asian Studies Monograph, New Series, no. 10 (Canberra: Australia National University, 1988).
99. See, for instance, Andrew Eisenberg, “Emperor Gaozong, the Rise of Wu Zetian and Factional Politics in the Early Tang,” Tang Studies 30 (2012): 45–69.
100. See Qiang Fang, “Hot Potatoes: Chinese Complaint Systems from Early Times to the Late Qing (1898),” Journal of Asian Studies 68, no. 4 (2009): 1105–35; Wang Shuanghuai, “Wu Zetian yu kuli de guanxi” [The Relationship Between Wu Zetian and Her Cruel Officials], in Zhao Wenrun and Li Yuming, Wu Zetian yanjiu lunwenji, 177–86. Hu Ji, Wu Zetian benzhuan, devotes two chapters to Wu Zhao’s cruel officials (ku li 酷吏). See also Rothschild, “Rhetoric, Ritual and Support Constituencies,” subchapter “Wan Guojun,” 252–59; and Ma Xiaoli, “Guanyu Wu Zetian zhongyong kuli de jidian kanfa” [Several Observations on Wu Zetian’s Heavy Utilization of Cruel Officials], Yantai daxue xuebao no. 3 (1991): 42–44.
I. GODDESSES OF ANTIQUITY
1. William McNeill, “The Care and Repair of Public Myth,” Foreign Affairs 61, no. 1 (Fall 1982): 5.
2. Susan Mann, “Presidential Address: Myths of Asian Womanhood,” Journal of Asian Studies 59, no. 4 (2000): 835–37.
3. Anne Birrell, Chinese Mythology: An Introduction (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), 163.
4. Mann, “Myths of Asian Womanhood,” 842.
5. Sir James George Frazer, The New Golden Bough (New Jersey: Phillips, 1965), 132.
1. WU ZHAO AS THE LATE SEVENTH-CENTURY AVATAR OF PRIMORDIAL GODDESS NÜWA
1. Mark Edward Lewis, The Flood Myths of Early China (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2006), 120; Schafer, The Divine Woman, 39.
2. Christina Miu Bing Cheng, “Matriarchy at the Edge: The Mythic Cult of Nüwa in Macau” (paper presented at the 17th Triennial Conference of the International Comparative Literature Association, Hong Kong, 8–15 August 2004).
3. Schafer, The Divine Woman, 37.
4. Edward Schafer, “Ritual Exposure in Ancient China,” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 14, no. 1/2 (1951): 156, referring to Chen Mengjia’s 陳夢家 1936 article “Myths and Shamanism in Shang China” [Shangdai de shenhua yu wushu 商代的神話與巫術].
5. Qu Yuan, Chuci/Ch’u Tz’u: Songs of the South, trans. David Hawkes (Boston: Beacon, 1959), 51; and Birrell, Chinese Mythology, 35, from “Heavenly Questions” (Tian wen 天文).
6. Andrew Plaks, Archetype and Allegory in Hsi yü chi and Hung lou meng (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1976), 30.
7. Translation from Cai Junsheng, “Myth and Reality: The Projection of Gender Relations in Pre-historic China,” in Min Jiayin, The Chalice and the Blade, 35.
8. Liezi, chaps. 2 and 5, trans. Fatima Wu, in Images of Women in Chinese Thought and Culture: Writings from the Pre-Qin Period Through the Song Dynasty, ed. Robin Wang (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2003), 96. On the dating, in Liezi/The Book of Lieh-tzu: A Classic of Tao (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990), 1, A. C. Graham remarks that “the predominant opinion of scholars in China is now that it was written as late as A.D. 300.” This passage also appears in Huainanzi [The Master of Huainan], comp. Liu An (Xi’an: Hanji quanwen jiansuo xitong, 2004), “Surveying Obscurities” (Lanming xun 覽冥訓), chapter 6 (hereafter HNZ).
9. HNZ 6.95. Lewis, Flood Myths, 111–12, translates this account of Nüwa quelling the flood.
10. HNZ 17.292. Translation from Cai Junsheng, “Myth and Reality,” 35.
11. Cai Junsheng, “Myth and Reality,” 44–45.
12. Shanhai jing [Classic of Mountains and Seas], trans. Anne Birrell (New York: Penguin, 1999), 173.
13. This late Eastern Han work is cited in the Northern Song Taiping yulan [Imperial Readings of the Taiping Era], ed. Li Fang (Beijing: Zhonghua, 1995), 78.365 (hereafter TPYL); translation from Derk Bodde’s “Myths of Ancient China,” 388.
14. Schafer, The Divine Woman, 38.
15. Wu Hung, The Wu Liang Shrine (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1989), 144, 156, and 161; Cheng Te-k’un, “Yin-yang Wu-hsing in Han Art,” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 20, no. 1/2 (1957): 182.
16. Denise Chao, “The Snake in Chinese Belief,” Folklore 90, no. 2 (1979): 195.
17. Lee Irwin, “Divinity and Salvation: The Great Goddesses of China,” Asian Folklore Studies 49, no. 1 (1990): 55.
18. Birrell, Chinese Mythology, 164. In The Divine Woman, Schafer (1980) remarks, “Orthodox belief, from Han times on, found difficulties in reconciling this zoomorphic deity with the ideal but artificial hero or heroine to which her name was finally applied, in accordance with the new ‘Confucian’ insistence on euhemerization. Her gradual degradation from her ancient eminence was partly due to the contempt of some eminent and educated men for animalian gods, and partly to the increasing domination of masculinity in elite social doctrine” (37).
19. Cai Junsheng, “Myth and Reality,” 44.
20. Edward Schafer, Ancient China (New York: Time Life, 1967), 102. Justine Snow, in “The Spider’s Web. Goddesses of Light and the Loom: Examining the Evidence for Indo-European Origin of Two Ancient Chinese Deities,” Sino-Platonic Papers 118 (June 2002): 26, similarly maintains that “after the revisionist Han period this heroine was demoted and her worship was discouraged by the ruling class.”
21. Edward Schafer, Pacing the Void (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977), 23.
22. Robin Wang, Yin Yang: The Way of Heaven and Earth in Chinese Thought and Culture (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 101–2.
23. TPGJ 304.2407; translation modified from Schafer, The Divine Woman, 63.
24. QTS 162; translation from Schafer, The Divine Woman, 92.
25. Li Fubu, “Gudai ming nüzi: fenfen ru Tangshi” [Celebrated Women Sprinkled in Tang Poems], Zhishi jiushi liliang no. 3 (2007): 72–73.
29. For this catalog of misfortunes, see ZZTJ 203.6410. See also Richard Guisso, “The Reigns of the Empress Wu, Chung-tsung and Jui-tsung,” in The Cambridge History of China, vol. 3, Sui and T’ang China, ed. Denis Twitchett and John Fairbank (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), 278 (hereafter CHC).
31. Zhao Wenrun, “Wu Zetian yu ‘wenzhang siyou,’” 51–52.
33. Zhao Wenrun, “Wu Zetian yu ‘wenzhang siyou,’” 52–53.
34. QTW 243.2461. Li Qiao wrote this memorial on behalf of General Wei Daijia.
36. Zhao Wenrun, “Wu Zetian yu ‘wenzhang siyou,’” 53. Based mostly on Li Qiao’s biographies in the two Tang histories, Zhao charts the trajectory of the rhetorician’s career. Li Qiao rose to chief minister during the Sage Calendar era (20 December 697 to 27 May 700).
37. Bokenkamp, “A Medieval Feminist Critique,” 390; c.f. QTW 248.2510. In this inscription, Li Qiao mentions Wu Zhao’s decision in 691 to establish a Great Cloud Monastery in every prefecture. More precisely, the inscription uses her title Maitreya, Sagely and Divine Emperor, Cakravartin of the Golden Wheel Transcending Antiquity, granted 23 November 694. As “Maitreya” was removed on 6 March 695, the inscription was likely composed during that three-and-a-half-month window.
38. JTS 31.1131 gives the date of the creation of the musical composition as the first year of Guangzhai (19 October 684 to 9 February 685).
41. ZZTJ chaps. 203 and 204. For summaries of this critical juncture in secondary sources, see N. Harry Rothschild, Wu Zhao, China’s Only Woman Emperor, Longman World Biography Series (New York: Longman, 2008), 81–91; Guisso, CHC, 290–306.
42. Xunyu 獯鬻 is likely a reference to the Turkic tribes that resettled within the Tang borders during Gaozong’s reign. It is another term for Xiongnu, the northern steppe tribes that had plagued the Central Plains since the Warring States era.
43. Juli 句驪 is an ancient name for the Korean peninsula. Gaozong conquered Koguryo in 668, the signature martial feat of his reign.
44. Gaozong and Wu Zhao jointly performed the feng and shan rites on Mount Tai in 666. See ZZTJ 201.6346; JTS 5.89–90; 23.888; see also Wechsler, Offerings of Jade and Silk, 184–85.
45. Rothschild, “Wu Zhao’s Remarkable Aviary,” Southeast Review of Asian Studies 27 (2005): 73. This article contains a longer section on the symbolic role of the phoenix during Wu Zhao’s ascendancy and rule (72–76). Laiyi originally comes from a passage in the “Canon of Yao” chapter of the Book of History: “When the pipes and the yong bell are used in timely fashion, birds and beasts come rapidly; when the flute harmonizes the nine achievements, the phoenix comes and regulates (laiyi)”; see Shangshu zhengyi [Orthodox Commentary on the Book of History], ed. Kong Yingda, in Shisan jing zhushu [Commentaries and Notes on the Thirteen Classics], chief ed. Li Xueqin (Beijing: Beijing University Press, 1999), 5.127.
The creation of musical instruments with perfect ritual pitch and cadence was also attributed to Nüwa. See Sui Shu [History of the Sui Dynasty], comp. Wei Zheng (Beijing: Zhonghua, 1996), 30.375 (hereafter SS). For more on the connection between Wu Zhao, female divinities, the phoenix, and properly harmonious ritual instruments, see chap. 8, “The Queen Mother of the West and Wu Zhao,” in this volume.
46. Shuowen jiezi [An Explanation and Analysis of Chinese Characters], comp. Xu Shen (Zhengzhou: Zhongyuan nongmin, 2000), 1156.
47. ZZTJ 171.5301. Lu Lingxuan was the influential wet nurse of young Qi emperor Gao Wei (r. 565–77).
48. XTS 4.87; and ZZTJ 204.6448.
49. See Laozi, Tao Te Ching, trans. D. C. Lau (London: Penguin, 1963), 57, (I.1).
52. Kwang-chih Chang, Art, Myth and Ritual, 12–13; Birrell, Chinese Mythology, 114–15.
54. “Siji,” The Book of Songs (Ji’nan: Shandong Friendship Press, 1999), 707.
55. Yang Lien-sheng, “Female Rulers in Imperial China,” 52.
56. There are many variants of the Three Sovereigns. See Kwang-chih Chang, Art, Myth and Ritual, 2.
57. Fengsu tongyi, chap. 1, in Images of Women in Chinese Thought, trans. Fatima Wu, ed. Robin Wang, 99.
59. Jin shu [History of Jin], comp. Fang Xuanling (Beijing: Zhonghua, 1997), 35.1053 (hereafter JS).
60. THY 7.93. The Mysterious Register (xuan lu 玄籙) seems to have been a cryptic source of the secrets of governance.
62. Like Emperor Shun of antiquity, facing south and ruling through effortless action.
63. QTW 13.162. This translation is drawn from a version of the edict recorded in the second chapter of Du Guangting’s Daode zhen jing guangsheng yi 道德真經廣聖義 (recorded in the QTW as the Daode shenjing guangxun 道德真經廣訓, likely a minor mistake).
66. XTS 107.4069; QTW 209.2115.
68. QTW 780.8151. This text also appears in the commentary of the Comprehensive Mirror (ZZTJ 205.6502) from 695, intimating that the remonstrance of the Wife of Yidu prompted Wu Zhao to order her monk-lover Xue Huaiyi beaten to death. There is no viable evidence, however, that indicates the historicity of the Wife of Yidu, let alone that Wu Zhao followed her advice. See also Cai Junsheng, “Myth and Reality,” 35.
69. This is the same sort of remonstrance a good Confucian wife, as “inner helper,” might offer her husband. See Paul Rakita Goldin, The Culture of Sex in Ancient China (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2002), 62–65.
70. Liang Yongtao and Tang Zhigong, “Dui Guangyuan Wudai ‘Da Shu Lizhou dudufy Huangzesi Zetian Huanghou Wushi xin miaoji’ bei de jiaozhu ji xianguang wenti fenxi” [An Analysis and Commentary on the “New Shrine Record of Tang Empress Zetian of the Wu Family in Huangze Temple of Great Shu Commandery of Lizhou” from Five Dynasties-era Guangyuan], in Conference Proceedings from the 11th Conference of the Wu Zetian Research Association (Guangyuan, 2013), 431–37.
71. A version of this legend can be found in Bai Jian, “Shi xi Wu Zetian wulong ganyun shenhua de tuteng beijing jian shi Fu Xi taiyangshen shengsi xunhuan he weiyang tuteng neihan ji longshe tuteng chansheng beijing,” in Conference Proceedings from the 11th Conference of the Wu Zetian Research Association, 442. In Writing and Authority in Early China (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999), Mark Lewis notes that in one Han apocryphal tale, the mother of ancient ruler Yao, one of the ancient sage-rulers, had been impregnated by a dragon, though the dragon first presented her with a mystical chart or writing (440n43). See also Lewis, Flood Myths, 121.
72. Lewis, Flood Myths, 71.
73. SJ 8.341; see also, Sima Qian, Records of the Grand Historian, trans. Burton Watson (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 52.
74. This is another name for Laozi’s hometown in Luyi, Henan.
76. Wu Ding was a Shang king in the late thirteenth and early twelfth century B.C. who renovated a struggling dynasty.
78. See Kang Weimin, “Su Anheng sanjian Wu Zetian” [Su Anheng Thrice Remonstrates with Wu Zetian], He-Luo Chunqiu no. 3 (2007): 50–55.
79. QTW 237.2391. An abbreviated version of this petition can be found in ZZTJ 207.6556.
81. ZZTJ 207.6559; QTW 237.2392–93.
83. Lewis, Flood Myths, 150.
2. SANCTIFYING LUOYANG
1. Schafer, The Divine Woman, 68.
2. Qu Yuan, “Li Sao,” as translated by Paul Goldin in “Imagery of Copulation in Early Chinese Poetry,” Chinese Literature: Essays, Articles and Reviews 21 (December 1999): 56. See also Goldin’s translation of “Li Sao” in Hawai’i Reader of Traditional Chinese Culture, ed. Victor Mair, Nancy Steinhardt, and Paul Goldin (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2005), 99–100. The Wade-Giles in the translation has been changed to pinyin.
3. Goldin, “Imagery of Copulation,” 56.
4. Birrell, Chinese Mythology, 140; cf. Tang commentator Li Shan in Sibu congkan edition of Wenxuan 19.14.
5. The Cambridge History of Chinese Literature, vol. 1, To 1375, ed. Kang-i Sun Chang and Stephen Owen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 175.
6. Cao Zhi, “The Goddess of the Luo,” in Chinese Rhyme Poems, ed. Burton Watson (New York: Columbia University Press, 1971), 56–57.
7. Robert Cutter, “The Death of Empress Zhen: Fiction and Historiography in Early Medieval China,” Journal of the American Oriental Society 112, no. 4 (1992): 577. Cutter remarks on the consonance between the rhapsody and later zhiguai 志怪 (miraculous) tales featuring encounters between mortals and beautiful ghosts or divinities.
8. Schafer, The Divine Woman, 70.
9. Patricia Karetzky, “The Representation of Women in Medieval China: Recent Archaeological Evidence,” T’ang Studies 17 (1999): 216, based on a copy of the painting at the Freer Gallery in Washington.
10. Susan Nelson, “Tao Yuanming’s Sashes: Or, the Gendering of Immortality,” Ars Orientalis 29 (1999): 15.
11. Zhang Mingxue, “Gu Kaizhi zhi ‘Luoshen fu tu’ zhong de Daojiao shenxian yiyun” [Connotations of Daoist Immortals in Gu Kaizhi’s “Picture Scroll of the Luo River Nymph”], in Shijie zongjiao wenhua 1, no. 1 (2007): 31–32. There are four extant Song reproductions of Gu Kaizhi’s Eastern Jin masterpiece: two in the Forbidden City in Beijing (one from the Northern Song and one from the Southern Song); one in the Liaoning Museum; and one in the Freer Gallery.
12. Wu Hung, The Double Screen: Medium and Representation in Chinese Painting (London: Reaktion, 1996), 96–97. See also Tonia Eckfield, Imperial Tombs in Tang China, 618–907: The Politics of Paradise (New York: Routledge, 2005), 130.
13. Hou Han Shu [Later Han History], comp. Li Xián and Fan Ye (Beijing: Zhonghua, 1997), 6.259 (hereafter HHS).
16. Schafer, The Divine Woman, 90.
20. Du Guangting, Yongcheng jixian lu [Register of the Assembled Transcendents of the Walled City], in Yunji qiqian [Seven Tablets from the Satchel of Clouds], comp. Zhang Junfang (Beijing: Xinhua, 1996), 717–22. For more on Du Guangting and Maoshan Daoism, see Suzanne Cahill, “Performers and Female Taoist Adepts: Hsi Wang Mu as the Patron Deity of Women in Medieval China,” Journal of the American Oriental Society 106, no. 1 (1986): 155–56. There is no indication, however, that the Luo River goddess was considered exclusively Daoist in Wu Zhao’s time.
21. For more on the traditional foundations of Luoyang, see He Guanbao, ed., Luoyang wenwu yu guji [Cultural Relics and Records of Sui-Tang Luoyang] (Beijing: Xinhua, 1987); and Su Jian, Luoyang gudu shi [A History of Ancient Capital Luoyang] (Beijing: Bowen, 1989).
22. Zhang Jian, “Wu Zetian shiwen fanying,” 135. One can often find “Center of Heaven” in modern-day calligraphy samples in the Luoyang–Mount Song region.
23. ZZTJ 200.6308; XTS 3.58; JTS 4.77.
24. See Chen Yinke, “Ji Tangdai zhi Li-Wu-Wei-Wang hunyin jituan,” 85–96.
25. ZZTJ 204.6421; JTS 6.117; and XTS 4.83 all contain descriptions of these reforms.
26. See Forte, Political Propaganda, and part IV of this volume. The full name of the text is Commentary on the Meanings of the Prophecies About the Divine Sovereign in the Great Cloud Sutra.
27. The discovery of this augural stone (rui shi 瑞石) on 3 June 688 is recorded in XTS 4.87; JTS 24.925; and ZZTJ 204.6447. See also Forte, Political Propaganda, 271–72n79. This stone was found before the inscribed stone from the Luo River was presented to Wu Zhao. This is borne out by one of the ritual songs (QTS 5.56) written to celebrate the discovery of the latter stone: “The waters of the Si River first made manifest the mysterious image; now the kindly Luo has offered up the Eternal Diagram.”
28. Forte, Political Propaganda, 272.
29. Ibid., 275–76. On 276n99, Forte notes that tuzhong 土中, “center of the territory,” is a phrase used to indicate the central position of Luoyang in the Book of History.
31. XTS 4.90, 76.3480; JTS 6.121; ZZTJ 204.6467–69.
32. JTS 6.122; XTS 4.92, 14.342; TPGJ 243.2453.
33. JTS 87.2854. Li Zhaode supervised the project, also devising a system to renovate several city gates. The date is given as 692 in both Cefu yuangui [Storehouse of the Original Tortoise], comp. Wang Qinruo (Beijing: Zhonghua, 1994), 504.6048 (hereafter CFYK); and ZZTJ 205.6478–79.
34. For two accounts of the development of Luoyang into a spectacular capital under Wu Zhao, see Wang Feng’s essay, “Wu Zetian yu Tang Luoyang ducheng jianshe” [Wu Zetian and the Construction of Tang Capital Luoyang], He-Luo chunqiu no. 3 (2007): 15–20; and Guo Shaolin, Sui-Tang Luoyang, 34–61.
35. JTS 6.124; 89.2902; XTS 4.95; ZZTJ 205.6494, 6496; TPGJ 240.1850; 236.1816.
36. For a thorough study of this ideologically multilayered architectural marvel, see Antonino Forte, Mingtang and Buddhist Utopias, esp. 143–53.
37. For Wu Zhao’s elaborate ceremony to install the tripods, see ZZTJ 206.6517; XTS 4.95; THY 11.279–80. For the original political myth of the Nine Tripods, see Kwang-chih Chang, Art, Myth and Ritual, 63–64 and 95–97.
38. Tang da zhaoling ji [Edicts and Imperial Decrees of the Tang], comp. Song Minqiu (Shangwu, Taiwan: Huawen, 1968), 95.
39. Zhang Jian, “Wu Zetian shiwen fanying,” 136.
40. See Kwang-chih Chang, The Archaeology of Ancient China (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987).
41. CFYK 504.6048. See also later texts like Xu Song’s nineteenth-century Tang Liangjing chengfang kao [A Study of the Walled Cities and Wards of the Two Tang Capitals] (Beijing: Zhonghua, 1985), 5.178 (hereafter TLJCFK).
43. JTS 6.115, 119; 24.925; XTS 4.87; 76.3470; ZZTJ 204.6448. On the problematic translation of the eight-character omen that appears on the Precious Diagram, see Kory, “Tang-Dynasty Augural Stone,” 101n9.
44. In Offerings of Jade and Silk, Howard Wechsler describes Haotian shangdi as an “all-embracing, universal Heavenly deity who belonged not to one family but to all the empire” (x).
45. JTS 6.115, 119; 24.925; XTS 4.87, 76.3470; ZZTJ 204.6448–54. For the most extensive and directed study of the Precious Diagram, see Kory, “Tang-Dynasty Augural Stone,” 99–124. Doran, “Insatiable Women,” has remarked that Wu Zhao’s “great faith in a blatantly sycophantic forgery” is part of a familiar narrative construction to delegitimize female rulers, a tradition reflected in her reported “wanton acceptance” (232) of “auspicious” omens manufactured by sycophants.
46. For the role of credenda and miranda in political power, see Charles Merriam, Political Power (New York: Collier, 1964), 125–33.
47. Lewis, Flood Myths, 196n36.
48. Doran, “Insatiable Women,” 224. Weinstein, in Buddhism Under the T’ang, similarly observed that the very name Precious Diagram suggested “the prognostication charts and books that supposedly emerged from the Yellow and Lo Rivers during the reigns of mythical sage emperors Fu-hsi and Yü” (41).
49. Robin Wang, Yin Yang, 208.
50. Zhouyi zhengyi [Correct Meanings of the Zhou Book of Changes], comp. Kong Yingda, in Shisanjing zhushu, ed. Li Xueqin, (Beijing University Press, 1999), 7.290.
51. Lewis, Flood Myths, 196n36; cf. Mozi/Ethical and Political Works of Motse, trans. Mei Yi-pao. (Westport, Conn.: Hyperion, 1973), 19, “Feigong xia” 非攻下.
52. Wang Shuanghuai and Zhao Wenrun, Wu Zetian pingzhuan, 167. For more on Fuxi as the recipient of the River Chart, see Michael Saso, “What Is the ‘Ho-t’u’?” History of Religions 17, no. 3/4 (1978): 406–7. He cites Han shu [History of the Han Dynasty], comp. Ban Gu and Ban Biao (Beijing: Zhonghua, 1997), 27.315–16 (hereafter HS), and the Zhonghou apocryphal commentary on the Book of Documents. Also see Lewis, Writing and Authority, 200–1, who links Fuxi’s association with the Yellow River Chart to his association with the origins of writing, 197–201. Fuxi is not alone in his connection with the Yellow River Chart. There is a more complex matrix of mythology surrounding the emergence and transmission of the Yellow River Chart that is linked to other culture heroes: the Yellow Emperor, Cang Jie, King Wu of Zhou.
53. HS 75.3189. See also Li Zhao, “Lun Wu Zetian bai Luo shoutu yu Luoshen de bianyi,” 74–83.
54. Wechsler, Offerings of Jade and Silk, 32.
55. Lewis, Flood Myths, 118–19, discusses the political potency of these celebrated charts.
56. For Gaozong and Wu Zhao, “Two Sages” was not an official title, but a popular nickname that acknowledged Wu Zhao’s political participation. According to the Old Tang History (JTS 6.115), “From the Xianqing reign era (656–660) on, Gaozong was often afflicted with illness. All petitions and memorials were determined by the Celestial Empress … for several decades, her prestige and influence was no different than that of the emperor. So people of the time called them the Two Sages.” XTS 76.3475–76 reads, “When Shangguan Yi was executed [in 664], political power returned to behind the curtain. The Son of Heaven simply folded his hands. The officials of the four quarters who submitted memorials called emperor and empress the Two Sages.” ZZTJ 201.6242–43 contains a similar account.
The earliest reference to the Two Sages in official histories appears in the Later Han History, where it is used to indicate Kings Wen and Wu of the Zhou. Mere decades before Wu Zhao’s time, Sui Wendi’s Empress Dugu sat on the throne with her husband and coauthored edicts. They were called “the Two Sages,” a title that concealed the feminine aspect of Empress Dugu. Given this political value, it is little wonder Wu Zhao borrowed this number from Dugu’s political repertoire.
57. Forte, Political Propaganda, 372. The Luo River Writing had tremendous resonance in Daoism as well. Catherine Despeux, in “Talismans and Sacred Diagrams,” identifies the Flying Tortoise of the Yi and Luo rivers (Yi-Luo feigui 伊洛飛龜) that brought forth the Luo River Writing, as one of the talismanic cosmic diagrams, the “numinous treasures,” central to the Lingbao Daoist tradition (Daoism Handbook, 505). In an apocryphal Daoist text of the late Han or early Period of Disunity, the tortoise-borne Luo River Writing, a talisman endowed with numinous powers that helped the practitioner connect with divine powers, is written in red and green. See Yamada Toshiaka, “The Lingbao School,” in Kohn, Daoism Handbook, 228.
In an era in which the “three faiths” coexisted, competed, and shared many intellectual strands, Buddhism, too, appropriated some of the traditional weight of the sacrosanct Luo River Writing. Chen Jinhua, in his article “Yixing 一行 and Jiugong 九宮 (‘Nine Palaces’): A Case of Chinese Redefinition of Indian Ideas,” China Report 48 (2012): 115–16, shows that the Buddhist monk Yixing worked to integrate “the Sinitic intellectual pattern” of the Five Phases (wuxing 五行) encoded in the Luo River cosmogram into a mandala of his design.
58. JTS 24.925; XTS 4.87; ZZTJ 204.6449; THY 47.833. Kory (“Tang-Dynasty Augural Stone,” 101–3) translates this section. He (104) points out that Wu Zhao lifted her next two reign names “Eternal Prosperity” (Yongchang 永昌) and “Heaven Bestowed” (Tianshou 天授), the first era of her Zhou dynasty, from the inscription on the augural stone. Though many rulers had honored and worshipped the Luo, Li Zhao contends that Wu Zhao’s act of investing the Luo River spirit with the title “Marquise Who Reveals the Saint” was unprecedented.
59. In traditional Chinese schema of the Five Marchmounts, Mount Song was the central peak—Mount Tai to the east, Mount Hua to the west, Mount Heng 恒山 to the north, and Mount Heng 衡山 to the south are usually regarded as the other four. Mount Heng was also one of the Four Marchmounts in Buddhism, along with Mount Wutai, Mount Putuo, and Mount Emei.
60. QTW 209.2115. A general wishing to express his good wishes, Cheng Chubi sought a talented man of letters to convey his feelings and found Chen Zi’ang to write this memorial on his behalf. JTS 68.2504 contains a thumbnail biography for Cheng Chubi, appended at the end of the longer biography of his father Cheng Zhijie, who had served as a general under Taizong.
61. Kory, “Tang-Dynasty Augural Stone,” 105–10.
63. The first three Tang rulers: Gaozu, Taizong, and Gaozong.
64. Yiwen leiju [Classified Collection of the Literary Arts], comp. Ouyang Xun (Shanghai: Shanghai guji, 1982), 8.161–62.
66. For instance, Yu is described in Kong Anguo’s Western Han commentary, cited in Kong Yingda’s (574–648) later commentary on the Book of Documents. See Timothy Wai Keung Chan, Considering the End: Mortality in Early Medieval Chinese Poetic Representation (Leiden: Brill, 2012), 22n52.
67. Guben Zhushu jinian jijiao [Comparative Annals of Ancient Bamboo Records], ed. Zhu Youzeng (Shenyang: Liaoning jiaoyu, 1997), 40.
68. QTS 59.706. In Mozi, chap. 19, the writing on the Yellow River Chart is also green. See also Lewis, Flood Myths, 196n36.
69. QTW 243.2457–58. See also Kory, “Tang-Dynasty Augural Stone,” 119.
70. Kory, “Tang-Dynasty Augural Stone,” translates and comments upon the entirety of Li Qiao’s memorial (112–22).
72. QTS 99.1072. Niu Fengji does not appear in either of the Tang histories. This is his only poem in the Complete Anthology of Tang Poetry. It is accompanied by the remark that in the Protracted Longevity era (23 October 692 to 6 June 694), Wu Zhao entrusted him with the compilation of the Tang History.
74. Julia Ching, “Son of Heaven: Sacral Kingship in Ancient China,” T’oung Pao 83 (1997): 39.
75. XTS 76.3480; JTS 24.925; ZZTJ 204.6454. Eugene Wang, in Shaping the Lotus Sutra: Buddhist Visual Culture in Medieval China (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2005); and Chen Jinhua, in Philosopher, Practitioner, Politician: The Many Lives of Fazang (643–712) (Leiden: Brill, 2007), both recognize this as a staged event, “part of an elaborately planned process of legitimation” (Wang, 144) in Wu Zhao’s protracted campaign for emperorship.
76. QTS 5.55–56; QTW 12.107–09; JTS 30.1113–15. Both JTS and QTW record that there are fifteen rather than fourteen hymns. Both sources indicate that the “Harmony of Revelation” song was played twice—the first time to worship the Luo River and the second time to honor Wu Zhao receiving the diagram. As the name for the collection of songs written for the occasion, I have used the title from JTS 30, “Music to Honor the Luo River with Grand Sacrifice” (Da xiang bai Luo zhang 大響拜洛章), rather than the QTS title, “Music for the Great Tang Sacrifice to Venerate the Luo” (Tang da xiang bai Luo yuezhang 唐大饗拜洛樂章). This ceremony to the Luo River was not the only time Wu Zhao celebrated the discovery of the Precious Diagram in song and ritual. When Wu Zhao personally composed a twelve-stanza song for the universal deity in Tang China, the Supreme Thearch of Boundless Heaven, she also alluded to the diagram. See JTS 30.1092; and QTS 5.52–53; 10.87.
78. Doran, “Insatiable Women,” 141, 143.
79. JTS 8.177; 24.925; XTS 5.126.
80. XTS 5.126. See also Forte, Political Propaganda, 207, and Mingtang and Buddhist Utopias, 243–45 and 267–68. Forte has remarked on the violent reaction of “the conservative wing of Confucianism” against Wu Zhao and cataloged the campaign of Xuanzong to erase her imprint upon Luoyang. Also see Tonami Mamoru, “Policy Towards the Buddhist Church in the Reign of T’ang Hsuan-tsung,” Acta Asiatica 55 (1988): 27–47.
81. Wu Zhao took on the designation Celestial Empress in the eighth month of 674. See JTS 5.99; XTS 3.71; ZZTJ 202.6372–73.
82. For the dating of this memorial see Forte, Political Propaganda, 316n–317n. Forte remarks that “even this simple episode of the herb zhi shows us the connection among officials, relatives of Wu Zhao and Buddhist monks in finding and diligently interpreting the miracles and omens for the propaganda activity in favor of Wu Zhao.”
84. Wu Hung, The Wu Liang Shrine, 86; cf. Chunqiu fanlu.
86. Wang Bo, Lu Zhaolin, and Luo Binwang are the other three.
87. A spirit or deity associated with the Yellow River.
90. Forte, Political Propaganda, 305. Yitong (or Yi Tong, if a Daoist), Forte conjectures (305–6n235), was a Buddhist or Daoist monk whose prophetic record was compiled during Wu Zhao’s regency.
91. Because of the Buddhist context of the Record of Master Yitong, “saint” is used here.
92. QTW 243.2457, translation from Kory, “Tang-Dynasty Augural Stone,” 115.
93. Charles Hucker, A Dictionary of Official Titles in Imperial China (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1985), 399. Hucker is used for bureaucratic titles throughout this book.
3. FIRST LADIES OF SERICULTURE
1. SJ 1.21–22. In a prototype to the Book of Rites, Dai De’s 戴德 Western Han work Da Dai Li Ji 大戴禮記 [Record of Rites of Dai the Elder] (chap. 63), Nüying and Ehuang came to be considered the goddesses of the Xiang River.
3. Sanguo zhi [Chronicles of the Three Kingdoms], ed. Chen Shou (Beijing: Zhonghua, 1997), 5.165 (hereafter SGZ). See Robert Cutter and William Crowell’s translation of this chapter in Empresses and Consorts: Selections from Chen Shou’s Records of the Three States with Pei Songzhi’s Commentary (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1999), 106.
4. Bi Xiuling, “Lun Zhongguo fangzhi nüshen de jisi lisu jiqi yingxiang” [A Discussion of Sacrifices to Chinese Weaving Goddesses in Ceremony and Folk Practice], Changjiang daxue xuebao 30, no. 5 (2007), 14.
5. Bret Hinsch, “Textiles and Female Virtue in Early Imperial Chinese Historical Writings,” Nan nü 5, no. 2 (2003): 182.
6. For a much more thorough account of the origins of Leizu’s emergence as First Sericulturist and of other early silk deities and goddesses, see Dieter Kuhn, “Tracing a Chinese Legend: In Search of the Identity of the ‘First Sericulturalist,’” T’oung Pao, Second Series, 70 (1984): 213–45; or Kuhn, Science and Civilization in China, vol. 5, Chemistry and Chemical Technology, part 9, Textile Technology: Spinning and Reeling (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 247–72.
7. Kuhn, “Tracing a Chinese Legend,” 241.
8. Bi Xiuling, “Lun Zhongguo fangzhi nüshen,” 15.
9. Francesca Bray, Technology and Gender: Fabrics of Power in Late Imperial China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 183.
10. Bray, Technology and Gender, 183, 237. In the section titled “Paired Virtues: Plowing and Weaving” (185–91), Hinsch, in “Textiles and Female Virtue,” also examines the gendered pairing geng-sang 耕桑 (plowing and growing mulberries).
11. Hinsch, “Textiles and Female Virtue,” 171–72.
12. Bret Hinsch, Women in Early Imperial China (Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 2002), 68–69.
13. Hinsch, “Textiles and Female Virtue,” 182.
14. Ban Zhao, Admonitions for Women (Nü jie 女誡) in Hou Han shu 84.2789, in William De Bary and Irene Bloom, eds., Sources of Chinese Tradition, vol. 1, From Earliest Times to 1600 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), 824. Originally translated by Nancy Swann in Pan Chao: Foremost Woman Scholar of China (New York: Century, 1932), 86.
Francesca Bray (Technology and Gender, 184) has noted that one of the variant forms of gong (work) included the radical signifying “silk” or “textiles.”
Collectively, speech, appearance, morality, and work constituted the “four virtues” (side 四德) of women in Confucian thought.
15. “Tianguan neizai,” in Zhouli zhushu [Commentaries on the Zhou Book of Rites], annotated by Jia Gongyan 賈公彥 (Tang Dynasty, 7th cent.), in Shisanjing zhushu, ed. Li Xueqin (Beijing: Beijing University Press, 1999), 7.184. Du You’s mid-Tang Tongdian [Comprehensive Manual of Institutions] (Beijing: Zhonghua, 1996), 46.1188 (hereafter TD), corroborates this record, noting that beginning in the Zhou dynasty of antiquity, empresses performed sericulture rites in the springtime, weaving silk to make ceremonial raiment.
16. Chen Jo-shui, “Empress Wu and Proto-Feminist Sentiments,” 79. The sacred field ritual was often associated with First Agriculturist (xian nong 先農) Shennong, the Divine Farmer.
18. Hinsch, “Textiles and Female Virtue,” 187–88.
19. Kuhn, “Tracing a Chinese Legend,” 221.
22. Chen Jo-shui, “Empress Wu and Proto-Feminist Sentiments,” 79.
23. Kuhn, Science and Civilization in China, vol. 5, 247.
25. Hucker, in A Dictionary of Official Titles, translates sangu 三孤 as the “Three Solitaries,” remarking that it referred to “the three posts in the topmost echelon of the central government” (398).
27. Several scholars have identified this key passage in the Sui shu, written in the early Tang, as clinching evidence that Leizu was indeed the First Sericulturist in Tang China. In his study on the identity of the First Sericulturist, Dieter Kuhn (“Tracing a Chinese Legend,” 225) contends that by the Tang “the Chinese had no doubt as to the First Sericulturalist’s identity: they simply knew that lady Hsi-ling personified the First Sericulturalist.” Bi Xiuling (“Lun Zhongguo fangzhi nüshen,” 14) makes a similar claim.
29. SS 7.145. One li was roughly one-third of a mile; see CHC, xx, for weights, measurements, and distances in the Tang.
31. Michael Como, “Silkworms and Consorts in Nara Japan,” Folklore Studies 64, no. 1 (2005): 112.
33. ZZTJ 195.6134–35 records Wu Zhao’s initial entry into Taizong’s seraglio as a Talent.
34. JTS 4.74–75; 76.3475.
35. JTS 4.75; XTS 3.57; TD 46.1290; THY 10.260.
36. Chen Jo-shui, “Empress Wu and Proto-Feminist Sentiments,” 79–80; Rothschild, “Rhetoric, Ritual and Support Constituencies,” 56–57.
37. JTS 30.1122–23; QTS 12.116–17. There are several differences between the two versions. This translation adheres to the Old Tang History version.
38. JTS 4.75. In contrast to Wu Zhao’s long procession, in 759, Suzong’s Empress Zhang worshipped the First Sericulturist at a shrine in the imperial park just north of the imperial palace. For this rite, see JTS 24.935; 10.255; THY 10.260. The northern imperial park in Chang’an was also known as Xinei Park—see Victor Cunrui Xiong, Sui-Tang Chang’an: A Study in the Urban History of Medieval China (Ann Arbor: Center for Chinese Studies, University of Michigan, 2000), 57. His map of ritual centers in Chang’an (6.1) includes the location of the altar of the First Sericulturist.
39. Xiong, Sui-Tang Chang’an, 149.
40. JTS 15.370; XTS 12.329. In many rites and sacrifices, ceremonial jade coins were initially placed as an offering in a round basket. Corresponding in color with the direction north in Five Phases (wuxing 五行), the ritual coins used in the sacrifice to the First Sericulturist were black; this aligned with the ritual precinct where the rite was performed.
41. Chen Jo-shui, “Empress Wu and Proto-Feminist Sentiments,” 79–80.
43. JTS 5.92; XTS 3.67; THY 10.260.
44. JTS 5.98; XTS 3.71; THY 10.260.
45. JTS 5.100; XTS 3.71; THY 10.260; ZZTJ 202.6375.
46. Chen Jo-shui, “Empress Wu and Proto-Feminist Sentiments,” 107–08n13. Chen contends that Wu Zhao’s repeated performance of these First Sericulturist rites was part of a wider “proto-feminist” agenda, “a larger pattern of actions (including re-designating titles for the nine ranks of women in the inner palace and mass participation of women in the feng and shan ceremonies of 666) that promoted the position and interests of women” (79–80).
48. QTW 276.2805; JTS 51.2173; ZZTJ 209.6619–20.
50. For more on the efforts of these women who followed in the wake of Wu Zhao to establish a similar set of female political ancestors, see “Appendix: Daughters of Lesser Goddesses” at the end of this chapter.
51. Doran, “Insatiable Women,” 159–62.
52. Ibid., 171–72; cf. Tangshi jishi 唐詩紀事, comp. Ji Yougong 記有功 (Taibei: Dingwen, 1971), 3.34-35.
53. Bi Xiuling, “Lun Zhongguo fangzhi nüshen,” 14.
54. XTS 14.357. QTW 189.1908 contains a memorial by courtier-official Wei Shuxia requesting that the name be changed back to the traditional “sacred field altar.” This memorial was presented in Zhongzong’s court in 705, shortly after Wu Zhao’s ouster. Immediately after Zhongzong’s restoration of the Tang, almost all of Wu Zhao’s changes to ceremonial protocol and nomenclature were reversed. For more on this specific debate over the First Agriculturist altar, see THY 22.421–24; see also Kominami Ichiro, “Rituals for the Earth,” in Early Chinese Religion, part 1, Shang Through Han (1250 BC–220 AD), ed. John Lagerway and Mark Kalinowski (Leiden: Brill, 2009), 208–09.
55. Chen gui [Regulations for Ministers], comp. Wu Zhao, in Zhongjing ji qita wuzhong, Congshu jicheng chubian 0893 (Taibei: Shangwu, 1936), 60–61 (hereafter CG).
56. Madame Yang was not Wu Sansi’s flesh-and-blood grandmother. For more on the context and background of this inscription, see Antonino Forte, in “The Chongfusi in Chang’an: A Neglected Buddhist Monastery and Nestorianism,” in his edited volume L’inscription nestorienne de Si-ngan-fou: A Posthumous Work by Paul Pelliot (Kyoto: Italian School of East Asian Studies, 1996), 457; and Chen Jinhua, Monks and Monarchs, 111–12n6. The inscription was calligraphed by Wu Zhao’s son Li Dan, Ruizong.
58. Eliade, Myth and Reality, 12.
59. Hinsch, “Textiles and Female Virtue,” 200.
61. QTS 61.723 (Li Qiao); 91.987 (Wei Sili); 73.804 (Su Ting). See Doran, “Insatiable Women,” subchapter “A Landscape of Immortal Women: Visiting and Imagining the Powerful Women of the Imperial Court,” 143–45.
63. QTW 240.2427. Translation from Doran, “Insatiable Women,” 164. The Wu Girl star, like the Vermilion Bird, was associated with the south.
64. Edward Schafer, The Vermilion Bird: T’ang Images of the South (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967), 124–25.
65. QTS 93.1004. See Doran, “Insatiable Women,” 146.
66. QTS 106.1105. See Doran, “Insatiable Women,” 151–53.
II. DYNASTIC MOTHERS, EXEMPLARY MOTHERS
1. Doran, “Insatiable Women,” 38; see esp. her subchapter, “Violence and the Anti-mother: Precedents for the Unnatural Female and Her Quest for Power,” 51–83.
2. Many scholars have pointed out the problematic nature of Wu Zhao’s purported killing of her own children. See, for instance, Hu Ji, Wu Zetian benzhuan, 60–66; C. P. Fitzgerald, The Empress Wu (Melbourne: Cheshire, 1955), 22–23, 83–84; Richard Guisso, Wu Tse-t’ien and the Politics of Legitimation in T’ang China (Bellingham: Western Washington University Press, 1978), 23, 212–13n66.
3. Idema and Grant, The Red Brush, 17–42, contains not only commentary on and analysis of Ban Zhao’s remarkable career, but translations of her poetry, several memorials that she wrote to the emperor, and Admonitions for Women.
4. Anne Kinney, Representations of Childhood and Youth in Early China (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004), 20–21.
5. Dorothy Ko, Teachers of the Inner Chambers: Women and Culture in Seventeenth-Century China (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994), 17.
6. Judith Butler, “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory,” Theatre Journal 40, no. 4 (1988): 522.
7. Following Sherry Mou’s numbering precedent from her translations in chap. 33, “Women in the Standard Histories,” in Wang, Images of Women, 255–60, I indicate the chapter and entry number in Liu Xiang’s Biographies of Exemplary Women. Here, for instance, 1.4 indicates the Woman of Tushan appears in chap. 1, entry 4.
8. The mother of Zhao general Kuo does not appear among the models of “maternal rectitude” in the opening chapter. Her account appears in the final entry of the third chapter, “Biographies of the Benign and Wise.”
9. This lineage of reproduction and commentaries is discussed in detail in chap. 7 of this volume.
10. Mou (“Women in the Standard Histories,” 255–64) has translated the prefaces (xu 序) and eulogies (zan 讚) for “Biographies of Exemplary Women” in three histories—The Later Han History, The Jin History, and the History of the Northern Dynasties.
11. Yu 虞 is Emperor Shun 舜. His Consort Nüying and Empress Ehuang are featured in the opening chapter of Liu Xiang’s Biographies.
12. You Shen 有莘 of Yousong 有娀 married King Tang, the first ruler of the Shang dynasty.
13. As dowager-regent, Empress Deng presided over the Eastern Han court from A.D. 106 to A.D. 121. The famous female historian-scholar Ban Zhao served as her adviser.
14. JS 96.2507. Modified from Mou’s translation in “Women in the Standard Histories,” 257. The preface preceded accounts of thirty-five Jin-era women who Fang Xuanling, the compiler of the history, deemed worthy of inclusion.
15. Sometimes a single entry in Biographies of Exemplary Women contains several separate but connected women—e.g., “The Two Consorts of Yu” (1.1) or “The Three Mothers of Zhou” (1.6).
4. THE MOTHER OF QI AND WU ZHAO
1. SJ 2.84. There is another tradition in which Nüwa and the Woman of Tushan are conflated, so that Yu the Great and Nüwa appear as husband and wife. See Lewis, Flood Myths, 121, 134. This monograph treats the two women as distinct figures.
Albert O’Hara, in The Position of Women in Early China (Taipei: Mei Ya, 1971), 20n1, notes that Tushan was a small ancient statelet set along the Huai River in Anhui.
2. Shu Ching, trans. Clae Waltham (Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1971), 34.
3. Dengfeng xianzhi [Dengfeng County Annals] (1803; Henan: Dengfeng County Office, 1984), 81–82, (hereafter DFXZ). See also Birrell, Chinese Mythology, 122–23; Lewis, Flood Myths, 138. The stone of the mother of Qi is at the very foot of Mount Song, not far from modern-day Dengfeng. According to Wuyue shihua [Legends of the Five Marchmounts] (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1982), 107, Yu’s father Gun 鯀 was also known as Earl Chong (Chong bo 崇伯). Interestingly, chong (崇) and the song (嵩) of Mount Song share a common etymological origin.
6. See Paul Kroll, “The Memories of Lu Chao-lin,” Journal of the American Oriental Society 109, no. 4 (1989): 590.
7. O’Hara, The Position of Women, 20–21. Translation of Lienü zhuan [Biographies of Exemplary Women], comp. Liu Xiang; Song woodblock edition with illustrations by Gu Kaizhi (Charlottesville, Va.: University of Virginia Library Electronic Text Center), 1.4, http://etext.virginia.edu/chinese/lienu/browse/LienuImgTOC.html (hereafter LNZ). Another story in the DFXZ (82) also illustrates the lofty character of the Tushan Girl. At one juncture, Yu the Great reputedly offered to bequeath his sovereignty not to his son Qi, but to his minister Boyi. Boyi declined and decided to lead a reclusive life on Jishan (part of greater Mount Song; Wu Zhao and Gaozong set up a shrine here in 683; JTS 5.110). As a result, kingship was passed from father to son and the Xia dynasty began. When Boyi died, Qi’s mother offered sacrifices on his behalf.
8. Lewis, Flood Myths, 79–82. He also notes that many of the offspring were, for their part, wicked and unfilial sons. Citing Mozi and other texts, Lewis comments that Qi, indulging in excess drink and music, “is treated as a deviant or criminal, acting as a moral inversion to his father Yu” (82).
9. “Quwu of Wei” from “Biographies of the Benign and Wise” (LNZ 3.14), as translated in O’Hara, The Position of Women. SJ 49.1967 contains a similar passage, which is translated in Lisa Raphals, Sharing the Light (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998), 19. An anti-exemplar, Moxi is featured as the opening biography in chap. 7 of the Lie nü zhuan, “Biographies of Pernicious Favorites” (Niebi zhuan 孽嬖傳).
10. The “six forms of proper conduct” (liu xing 六行) are filial piety (xiao 孝), friendship (you 友), harmony (mu 睦), matrimony (yin 姻), a sense of duty (ren 任), and compassion (xu 恤).
12. Nan Qi shu [History of the Southern Qi Dynasty], comp. Xiao Zixian (Beijing: Zhonghua, 1997), 11.183 (hereafter NQS).
13. Wei shu [History of the Wei Dynasty], comp. Wei Shou (Beijing: Zhonghua, 1995), 92.1977.
14. Zhou shu [History of the Northern Zhou], ed. Linghu Defen (Beijing: Zhonghua, 1997), 9.147.
16. The first ancestor of Shang, born to Jiandi after she ate the egg of a dark swallow.
17. Hou Ji, first male ancestor of the Zhou, was born to Jiang Yuan after she trod in the Supreme God’s footprint. See chap. 5 in this volume.
21. QTW 219.2209. Cui Rong drafted this memorial for General Wei, probably Wei Daijia, who rose to eminence briefly during Wu Zhao’s regency, largely due to his help in overseeing the construction of Gaozong’s (and later Wu Zhao’s) imperial funerary park, Qianling. He served as a prime minister from 685 to 689. This is likely when the petition was written. It is not surprising that he asked Cui Rong to draft the edict, for it is recorded in his biography (JTS 77.2671–72; XTS 98. 3904) that the general was ridiculed because of his lack of talent in the civil arts.
22. QTW 209.2114. This wet nurse was honored as the Lady of the State of Feng. Chen Zi’ang drafted the memorial on her behalf.
23. The 600-line inscription can be found in the QTW 219.2515–23. Guisso (Politics of Legitimation, 11–16) provides a lengthy description of the content of the inscription. The Commentary on the Great Cloud Sutra (see also chapter 12) expressly states that “Coiling Dragon Tower” was another name for Wu Zhao’s Mingtang. See Forte, Political Propaganda, 269–70; Forte, Mingtang and Buddhist Utopias, 180, 194n.
24. This honorific was bestowed upon Wu Zhao’s mother (née Yang 楊) on 20 October 690, just days after the female emperor inaugurated her Zhou dynasty. See ZZTJ 204.6468 and XTS 4.91.
26. JTS 25.951; QTW 281.2848.
28. Shanhai jing, 115, 177. See also Chuci/Ch’u Tz’u: The Songs of the South, 49–50.
29. Sarah Allen, “The Myth of the Xia Dynasty,” Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland 2 (1984): 251.
30. Mozi/Ethical and Political Works of Motse, 212–13.
31. ZZTJ 205.6499 (order) and 206.6517 (completion). See also Fracasso, “The Nine Tripods,” 85–96.
32. Birrell, Chinese Mythology, 53.
33. Ibid., 83–84; cf. residual fragments of The Storehouse of All Things, a Han text that is “no longer extant except in fragments.”
34. Ibid., 85; cf. Shanhai jing.
36. Forte, Mingtang and Buddhist Utopias, 162.
37. TPYL 887.3943, referring to the Shanhai jing.
38. Ibid., 171–72. In chap. 26 of the Rizhilu 日知錄, Qing scholar Gu Yanwu (1613–1682) commented that the younger sister did not originally exist and was added by later generations of historians.
39. CFYG 2.18. In “Relics and Flesh Bodies: The Creation of Ch’an Pilgrimage Sites,” in Pilgrims and Sacred Sites in China, ed. Susan Naquin and Yü Chün-fang (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 155–65, Bernard Faure has noted that during the early Tang, there was a Chan Buddhist “conquest” of Mount Song; these Buddhist monks suppressed local cultic centers and shrines, replacing them with monasteries and stupas. Though Wu Zhao honored Chan masters like Shenxiu and Zhishen, she also protected and patronized certain local cults connected to Mount Song, like that of the Woman of Tushan.
41. QTW 192.1944. The precise dating for the composition of this inscription is problematic. See Pettit, “The Erotic Empress,” 129n22. The most plausible guess would be between 680 and 683, during Gaozong’s final years, when temples to the mother of Qi and other divinities in the vicinity of greater Mount Song were established.
42. The Kuodizhi 括地志 [Treatise of the Vast Earth] was a geographic manual written during Taizong’s reign by his fourth son Li Tai (618–652) and Xiao Deyan (558–645).
44. Pettit, “The Erotic Empress,” 131.
45. As with Yang Jiong’s inscription for Shaoyi, the precise timing is problematic. See Pettit, “The Erotic Empress,” 129n22.
46. For a biography of Cui Rong, see JTS 94.2996–3000 and XTS 114.4195–96. For a general overview of politics during Gaozong’s last years and the cliques forming around the crown princes, see Denis Twitchett and Howard Wechsler, “Kao-tsung (reign 649–83) and the Empress Wu: The Inheritor and the Usurper,” in CHC, 269–73; and Rothschild, Wu Zhao, 67–80.
47. Pettit (“The Erotic Empress,” 130–31) both points out the political motivation for Cui Rong’s florid inscription and remarks upon the differences between Cui’s inscription and Yang Jiong’s.
48. Barrett, Taoism Under the T’ang, 41.
49. Bokenkamp, “A Medieval Feminist Critique,” 387.
50. Gu Yewang (519–583) was a writer and commentator of the Northern Dynasties.
51. The commentary of TD 179.4737 indicates that “some people claim that capital of Yu of Xia was established in Henan’s Yangdi.” The “Treatise on Geography” in the HS 28 corroborates the claim that Yangdi was the location of the state of Yu of Xia. Following Zhongguo lishi dituji [Chinese Historical Atlas], ed. Tan Qixiang (Beijing: Zhongguo ditu, 1996), 2: 44–5, Yangdi, set along the Ying River, is about 35 km southeast of Mount Song. Tellingly, Yangdi is situated in Yu 禹 County—the Yu of Yu the Great.
52. Following CFYG 2.18, Huaxu is both the birthplace of Fuxi’s mother and the name by which she is known. Nüdeng is the mother of Divine Farmer, Shennong. Youfang is the mother of Zhuanxu.
53. Guo Pu (276–324) was a Daoist erudite of the Eastern Jin.
54. Li Tong was a Jin-era scholar who wrote a work researching burials.
56. QTW 220.2222. Translation from Pettit, “The Erotic Empress,” 137.
57. Pettit, “The Erotic Empress,” 142.
58. JTS 5.110 and THY 7.102. A Daoist observatory was established inside Fengtian Palace in 684; see THY 50.878.
60. The above-mentioned feng and shan sacrifices.
61. These titles were bestowed in the seventh lunar month of 688; see ZZTJ 204.6449 and chap. 2 of this volume.
62. Lesser Room was the site where Wu Zhao performed the shan rite in 696.
63. For more on this Daoist divinity, see chap. 8 of this volume.
64. ZZTJ 205.6504. See also JTS 6.124 and TPYL 110.529–30.
65. Zhao Xiaoxing, “Mogao ku di 9 ku ‘Songshan shen song mingtangdian ying tu’ kao” [A study of the Wall Painting in Cave Nine of the Mogao Grottoes of the God of Mount Song Sending a Pillar to the Mingtang], Dunhuang yanjiu no. 3 (2011), 40.
66. On Jade Capital (Yujing 玉京), see Paul Kroll, “Li Po’s Transcendent Diction,” Journal of the American Oriental Society 106, no. 1 (1986): 107; and Edward Schafer, “The Origin of an Era,” Journal of the American Oriental Society 85, no. 4 (1965): 545.
67. Isabelle Robinet, “Shangqing—Highest Clarity,” in Kohn, Daoism Handbook, 213.
68. TPGJ 1.1. The Tang Huiyao (50.865) records a title that Xuanzong bestowed upon Laozi in 754, Great Sage of the Exalted Great Dao, Emperor of the Primal Origin, and Golden Tower. A similar title is recorded in XTS 5.149 and in ZZTJ 217.6924.
69. Tang liudian [Tang Administrative and Legal Compendium of the Six Ministries], comp. Li Linfu (Beijing: Zhonghua, 1992), 7.221.
70. QTS 44.540. Both XTS 3.74 and JTS 5.103 indicate, for instance, that Gaozong and Wu Zhao retreated from Chang’an to the mountain palace in the fifth month of 678.
72. QTW 214.2166. Chen Zi’ang was directed by Zhang Changning to write the memorial. Zhang Changning’s motive likely was to help elevate his brothers, Wu Zhao’s favorites, Zhang Changzong and Zhang Yizhi. The timing (697) coincides neatly with the arrival of these two young men in Wu Zhao’s court. For the biographies of the Zhang brothers, see JTS 78.3337 and XTS 104.3921.
75. XTS 114.4195 and JTS 94.2996. The timing of the progress in question is unclear. In the Old Tang History, it is recorded that it was during the Sage Calendar era (20 December 697 to 28 May 700).
5. UR-MOTHERS BIRTHING THE ZHOU LINE
1. Lisa Raphals, “Gendered Virtue Reconsidered: Notes from the Warring States and the Han,” in The Sage and the Second Sex, ed. Li Chenyang (Chicago: Open Court, 2000), 236.
2. HS 20.863–68. See Raphals, “Gendered Virtue,” 228.
3. Raphals, “Gendered Virtue,” 229, citing SJ 49.1967.
5. Sarah Allen, “The Identities of Taigong Wang 太公望 in Zhou and Han Literature,” Monumenta Serica 30 (1972–1973): 69–72.
6. Translation is from Birrell, Chinese Mythology, 117–18, from Book of Songs 245. Wade-Giles has been changed to pinyin.
7. Kinney, Representations of Childhood, 36.
8. Robert Campany, “The Meaning of Cuisines of Transcendence in Late Classical and Early Medieval China,” T’oung Pao, Second Series, 91 (2005): 11–12.
9. In Chinese Views of Childhood (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1995), Anne Kinney observes that “great vitality” in an infant might be taken as a sign of “inborn wickedness” and might even constitute “justification to commit infanticide” (24–25).
10. Sarah Allen, in The Shape of the Turtle: Myth, Art and the Cosmos in Early China (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1991), remarks that the offspring of human unions with divinities are often abandoned (44).
11. SJ 1.3, as translated in Birrell, Chinese Mythology, 118. “Qi” literally means the “Discarded One” or the “Abandoned.”
12. Campany, “The Meaning of Cuisines,” 10.
13. Translation slightly modified from O’Hara, The Position of Women, 17–19. For original text, see LNZ 1.2.
14. SGZ 5.162–63. Translation Cutter and Crowell, Empresses and Consorts, 102.
15. Laurence E. R. Picken and Noël J. Nickson, Music from the Tang Court 7: Some Ancient Connections Explored (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 9, remark that the yize was considered to be one of six members of male pitch pipes in a “superior generation,” while zhonglü were one of six members of the pitch pipes belonging to the “inferior generation.”
16. According to the Zhou Book of Rites, the “Grand huo” was the music of Tang the Successful (Cheng Tang 成湯), the first ruler of the Shang.
17. SGZ 5.162–63. Translation from Cutter and Crowell, Empresses and Consorts, 102–03.
23. King Ling of Zhou reigned from 571 to 545 B.C.
24. My identification of King Wen as the original forefather (yuan fu 原夫) is also based on the fact that when Wu Zhao established her Zhou dynasty, she made the Zhou founder her Wu clan’s first ancestor. This is discussed further later in this chapter.
25. King Ling reputedly was born with a mustache; see SJ 14.630.
26. The text of the stele inscription, “Stele for the Ascended Immortal Crown Prince,” can be found in QTW 98.1007–08.
27. For more on the ties between Wu Zhao, Mount Goushi, the Queen Mother of the West, and Prince Jin, see chap. 8 in this volume; and Rothschild, “Wu Zhao’s Remarkable Aviary,” 76–79, 86–87n39.
29. XTS 76.3481–82; ZZTJ 204.6467. For a genealogical table of the Wu family and more on Wu Zhao’s family background, see Wang Shuanghuai and Zhao Wenrun, Wu Zetian pingzhuan, 1–7.
31. Chaoye jianzai [Collected Records from Court and Country], ed. Zhang Zhuo (Beijing: Zhonghua, 1997), 3.73. The same story appears in TPGJ 238.1832, and the kao yi 考異 (examining the discrepancies) of the ZZTJ 207.6554. Wang Yueting, in “Wu Zetian yu nianhao,” 154, mentions two meanings of Dazu—“the Buddha’s great footprint” (Fo zhi da zu 佛之大足) or, alternatively, “the great contentment” (da zu 大足) that Wu Zhao’s rule had brought about. Of course, these interpretations are not mutually exclusive but rather are coexisting layers. For more on the meaning of Dazu, see Rothschild, “An Inquiry into Reign Era Changes Under Wu Zhao,” 140–41, and Kroll, “True Dates of Reign Periods in the Tang Dynasty,” Tang Studies 2 (1984): 26.
32. Shijing [The Book of Songs], trans. Arthur Waley (New York: Grove, 1960), 241.
33. Eliade, Myth and Reality, 21–53, see chaps. 2 and 3, “Magic and the Prestige of ‘Origins’” and “Myths and the Rites of Renewal.”
34. Ishida Ei’ichiro, “Mother-Son Deities,” History of Religions 4, no. 1 (1964): 52.
35. Michael Puett, To Become a God: Cosmology, Sacrifice and Self-Divinization in Early China, Harvard-Yenching Institute Monograph no. 57 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Asia Center, 2004), 74–75.
37. The “five princes” (wu wang 五王) who conspired to engineer the 705 coup, oust Wu Zhao, and restore the Tang, were Zhang Jianzhi, Cui Xuanwei, Jing Hui, Huan Yanfan, and Yuan Shuji. Wu Zhao’s son Zhongzong invested them as princes for their role in restoring the Tang in the fifth month of 705. See ZZTJ 208.6591.
38. See Empress Wang’s biography, XTS 76.3473–74.
39. SS 7.137. The establishment of an imperial ancestral temple to Jiang Yuan was referenced earlier: ceremonial officials (SGZ 5.162–63) seeking to posthumously exalt Empress Zhen pointed out that in the Zhou dynasty of old Jiang Yuan had her own ancestral temple. In this same context, the establishment of a temple for Jiang Yuan is mentioned in other sources as well (JS 19.602; TD 47.1310).
40. JTS 25.951; QTW 281.2848.
6. WENMU AND WU ZHAO
1. Analects, 95, VIII.20.
2. THY 80.1476; XTS 76.3490. In both sources, Mother Wen is mentioned in terms of a ritual debate in 719 over the fitting posthumous title for Ruizong’s empress Dou. See chaps. 4 and 5 in this volume.
3. The term “three mothers of the house of Zhou” is found in LNZ 1.6 and the HHS 10.426. See also Du Fangqin, “The Rise and Fall of Zhou Rites,” 185–86.
5. Michael Nylan, The Five Confucian Classics (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001), 84–85.
6. Ode 240 in “Greater Odes” (Daya 大雅), Shijing [The Book of Songs] (Ji’nan: Shandong Friendship, 1999), 707–09. See also Nylan, The Five Confucian Classics, 2001, 85.
8. LNZ 1.6, modified translation of O’Hara, The Position of Women, 24–25. There is a passage in the ode “Grand Illustriousness” (Daming 大明), part of the Greater Odes, that contradicts this passage (Shijing, 688–89). There, King Wen’s first consort was a lady of “a great state” (da bang 大邦) whom he met on the banks of the Wei River with a bridge of boats to welcome her. Taisi appears to be his second consort, a “good lady from the state of Shen”:
The great state had a child;
She was as if a daughter of heaven.
[King] Wen determined an auspicious date
and personally met her on the Wei River,
Building rafts into a bridge;
Illustrious was her radiance!
By mandate from Heaven
The throne was handed down to King Wen
In the Zhou capital.
The succeeding empress from Shen,
The eldest daughter who came to marry him,
Faithfully bore King Wu.
Famous scholar Gu Jiegang connected these verses from the Book of Songs to the fifth line in hexagram 54 of the Book of Changes, the Marrying Maiden (Gui Mei 歸妹): “Di Yi 帝乙 marries off his daughter. The primary bride’s sleeves are not as fine as the secondary bride’s.” Gu “guessed” that the great state in the first verse was the Shang, and that taken in tandem these above-mentioned passages from the Book of Songs revealed a failed union between the daughter of Di Yi, the penultimate king of the decadent Shang, and King Wen of Zhou. In Before Confucius: Studies in the Creation of the Chinese Classics (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997), Edward Shaughnessy’s analysis of the Changes corroborates and expands upon Gu’s conjecture: The political marriage to Di Yi’s daughter failed, and King Wu was born of Taisi, a woman of Shen, “a small state traditionally said to have been ruled by descendants of former Xia” (16).
9. Translation from Chinese Women Poets: An Anthology of Poetry and Criticism from Ancient Times, ed. Kang-I Sun Chang, Haun Saussy, and Charles Yim-tze Huang (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), 19, originally HS 97.3985–86.
10. This is a reference to Nüying and Ehuang, consorts of Shun (also known as Yu 虞), not the Tushan sisters associated with Yu 禹 the Great.
11. Translation by Cutter and Crowell, Empresses and Consorts, 110. This imperial lament was added to Chen Shou’s original in Pei Songzhi’s (372–451) Liu Song–era commentary on the SGZ 5.167.
12. SGZ 5.155. See translation by Cutter and Crowell in Empresses and Consorts, 89.
14. Jiandi, who according to legend birthed the first male ancestor of the Shang after eating the egg of a dark swallow, does not fit the profile of these women who helped dynastic founders quite as neatly. Given this incongruity, perhaps the writer meant to record the spouse of Cheng Tang, the founder of the Shang.
17. NQS 11.183. The fourth line of the poem (the entire poem is not translated here) literally means consistently keeping the compass (gui 軌) perfectly oriented and the square (ju 距) plumb.
18. JTS 58.2316. See Howard Wechsler, “The founding of the T’ang dynasty: Kao-tsu (reign 618–626),” in CHC, 159–60.
19. ZZTJ 201.6345–46. For more on the feng and shan rites of 666, see Rothschild, Wu Zhao, 59–63.
21. ZZTJ 199.6291; XTS 93.3820.
22. For more on Li Ji’s role in Wu Zhao’s elevation to empress, see Twitchett and Wechsler, “Kao-tsung and the Empress Wu,” CHC, 249–51; Guisso, Politics of Legitimation, 17–18; and Rothschild, Wu Zhao, 34–35. Li Ji served as general under Gaozu, Taizong, and Gaozong, and as chief minister under Taizong and Gaozong. Guisso’s work (173) contains a thumbnail biography of Li Ji.
23. JTS 67.2486; XTS 93.3820.
25. JTS 23.886. ZZTJ 201.6344–45 contains an abridged, simpler version of Wu Zhao’s persuasive speech.
26. ZZTJ 201.6346; JTS 23.887. Southwest of modern-day Taian, Sheshou is a lesser hill that is part of greater Mount Tai. Gaozong and Wu Zhao were reenacting the shan rite that King Cheng of Zhou had performed on the site seventeen centuries earlier.
27. JTS 190.5018 QTW 212.2147.
28. Wang Shuanghuai and Zhao Wenrun, Wu Zetian pingzhuan, 106–08. On another point, Wu Zhao did not heed Chen Zi’ang: Gaozong (and later Wu Zhao) was buried at Qianling, to the northwest of Chang’an, and not in the proximity of Luoyang.
29. Cited passage is Analects VIII.20.
30. For a more detailed overview of both text and context, see Denis Twitchett, “Chen Gui and Other Works Attributed to Wu Zetian,” Asia Major 16, no. 1 (2003): 33–109; and Rothschild, “Rhetoric, Ritual and Support Constituencies,” chap. 5, appendix 3. QTW 97.1004–05 contains the preface to the Regulations.
33. The woman who married Cheng Tang, the first ruler of the Shang, came from the Youshen 有莘 clan.
36. For more on the origin of the Wus, see Liang Hengtang, “Tan Wu shi jiazu,” 49.
39. XTS 76.3481–2; ZZTJ 204.6467. The elevation of the Wu clan was not a one-stage event. In the ninth month of 684, when Wu Zhao established herself as grand dowager–regent, some proposed establishing seven ancestral temples for the Wus. While she did not take that step, she did elevate and give new titles to five generations of Wus, from her great-great-great-grandfather Wu Keji to her father Wu Shiyue (see XTS 4.83, 76.3478; ZZTJ 203.6422). Spouses were included. In the second month of 689, she once again gave greater titles to the five most recently deceased generations of Wus (XTS 76.3480; ZZTJ 204.6457). After the establishment in 690 of the seven imperial temples, the lofty titles honoring her ancestors from the Ji family and further elevation of her more recent Wu ancestors, there was yet another occasion where she bestowed even gaudier posthumous honors: in the ninth month of 693, Wu Zhao again announced another titular elevation of her Wu kinsmen (XTS 4.93–94; ZZTJ 205.6492). In this last titular revision, King Wen and Mother Wen did not receive new titles.
40. XTS 76.3482; ZZTJ 204.6472.
42. SJ 8.342. See Records of the Grand Historian, trans. Watson, 51.
43. QTW 249.2515. I discuss in Chapter 3 the role of Leizu in this inscription. Guisso, Politics of Legitimation, translates and analyzes sections of the inscription (11–16).
7. FOUR EXEMPLARY WOMEN IN WU ZHAO’S REGULATIONS FOR MINISTERS
2. XTS 58.1487; JTS 46.2006. Biographies of Filial Daughters is listed only in XTS 58.1487. JTS 6.133 attributes to Wu Zhao a shorter, twenty-chapter Biographies of Exemplary Women, which may, as Denis Twitchett, “Chen Gui and Other Works,” 37, points out, be the result of confusion. Twitchett (35–41) lists all the works attributed to, written by, and composed by order of Wu Zhao. Keith Knapp, in Selfless Offspring (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2005), 63, lists Wu Zhao’s twenty-chapter Biographies of Filial Daughters on a larger table of medieval accounts of filial offspring.
While it was by far the longest, Wu Zhao’s version of Biographies was certainly not the only version known in the Tang or during her Zhou dynasty. Tang histories (XTS 58.1486–87; JTS 46.2006) record many editions in circulation at the time: a fifteen-chapter version of Liu Xiang’s Biographies that included a commentary from Ban Zhao; a six-chapter edition compiled by Three Kingdoms scholar Huangfu Mi (215–282); a one-chapter version by Cao Zhi, accompanied by a poem on these celebrated women; an eight-chapter edition by Eastern Han scholar Liu Xi; and a seven-chapter edition by Mother Zhao. Jin scholar Qiwu Sui also had a seven-chapter edition; Xiang Zong compiled a ten-chapter Later Biographies for Exemplary Women (Lienü houzhuan 列女後傳)—presumably updating the genre (he or she also compiled a one-chapter biography of Daoist transcendent Wei Huacun); a Lady Sun also wrote a one-chapter Preface and Eulogy for Biographies of Exemplary Women; and Du Yu (222–285), another Three Kingdoms–era scholar-official, collated a ten-chapter Records of Exemplary Women (Lienü ji 列女記).
4. For a translation of the former, see Patricia Buckley Ebrey, “The Book of Filial Piety for Women Attributed to a Woman Née Zheng (ca. 730),” in Under Confucian Eyes: Writing on Gender in Chinese History, ed. Susan Mann and Yu-yin Cheng (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 47–69. For a translation of Analects for Women, see Wang, Images of Women, 327–40. Teresa Kelleher has translated parts of both, in De Bary and Bloom, Sources of Chinese Tradition I: 824-27.
5. Twitchett, “Chen Gui and Other Works,” 73.
6. Li Hexian, “Cong Chen gui kan Wu Zetian de jun-chen lunli sixiang” [Looking at the Ethics of the Ruler-Minister Relationship Through Regulations for Ministers], Huazhong shifan daxue xuebao 5 (1986): 58–62. Ji Qingyang, “Wu Zetian yu zhong-xiao guannian” [Wu Zetian and Her Concept of Loyalty and Filial Piety], Xibei daxue xuebao 39, no. 6 (2009): 138–39, also remarks upon the text’s role in fostering a culture of loyalty in Wu Zhao’s court.
11. The same sequence of texts appears in the biography of Yuan Wanqing, in XTS 201.5744 and JTS 190.5011.
12. In a subsection titled “Dynastic Crisis of the Late 670s,” Twitchett, “Chen Gui and Other Works,” 57–59, points out that amid a maelstrom of crises at this juncture, normative texts like Regulations helped Wu Zhao buttress her precarious political position.
13. JTS 86.2832; XTS 81.3591. The scholars of the Northern Gate were also involved in these compilations. Shaoyang 少陽—lesser yang—is a term referring to the imperial crown prince.
14. Twitchett, “Chen Gui and Other Works,” 76; cf. THY 75.1373.
17. This date is given on CG 64.
19. JTS 24.918; ZZTJ 205.6420.
20. Duan Tali, Tangdai funü diwei yanjiu, 57–58.
21. Josephine Chiu-Duke, “Mothers and the Well-being of the State in Tang China,” Nan Nü: Women and Gender in China 8, no. 1 (2006): 59. She remarks that the “male elite narrators” in official sources depicted mothers as being “directly or indirectly involved in the preservation of state” (56).
22. Jennifer Holmgren, “Women’s Biographies in the Wei Shu: A Study of Moral Attitudes and Social Background Found in Women’s Biographies in the Dynastic History of the Northern Wei” (PhD diss., Australia National University, 1979), 178–81. The “learned instructresses” stand out as distinct from other categories of women such as chaste widows, devoted wives, and filial daughters, in that these women are able to exercise authority outside the domestic sphere. Raphals, Sharing the Light, 54–55, identified ten subcategories of learned instructresses, including “mothers who instruct their children” and “mothers who instruct grown sons on their conduct as officials.”
23. Chiu-Duke, “Mothers and the Well-being of the State,” 59. See also her subchapter “Educating Sons for Official Careers,” 87–92.
25. CG preface, 1. Both the preface and main text of the 1936 Shangwu edition of Regulations begin with page 1. Therefore, here and for all subsequent footnotes drawn from the preface the word “preface” is used. In citations from the main text, only the page number is given. This translation is slightly modified from Twitchett, “Chen Gui and Other Works,” 75.
26. CG preface, 2. Twitchett, in “Chen Gui and Other Works,” notes that an identical phrase was part of the memorial Wu Zhao issued in 675 to propagate her twelve-article reform (75n86).
28. Lisa Raphals, “A Woman Who Understood the Rites,” in Confucius and the Analects: New Essays, ed. Bryan Van Norden (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 275–76. This section of the subchapter is not intended to provide an exhaustive study of Lady Ji of Lu and all the wise counsel she offered Wenbo and other members of the Ji family. Raphals shows that Jing Jiang’s renown predated the Liu Xiang Biographies. Narrative of States from the early Warring States era includes eight passages on Lady Ji of Lu, many of which illustrate the moral suasion that she as a widowed mother exercised over her son Wenbo. She also instructed him on proper ceremonial deportment in hosting guests. She was well known for being a perfect Confucian daughter-in-law, revering her parents-in-law and properly mourning her deceased husband. Also see Zhou Yiqun, Festivals, Feasts, and Gender Relations in Ancient China and Greece (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 245–47.
30. Zhou Yiqun, Festivals, Feasts, and Gender Relations, 258.
31. LNZ 1.9. O’Hara, The Position of Women, 30–37, translates Lady Ji of Lu’s full biography.
32. Raphals, Sharing the Light, 30–31; see also Raphals, “A Woman Who Understood the Rites,” 278.
33. Raphals, Sharing the Light, 31; and Raphals, “A Woman Who Understood the Rites,” 277, trans. LNZ 1.9.
34. Bray, Technology and Gender, 191.
35. LNZ 1.9. Raphals, “A Woman Who Understood the Rites,” 278–79, paraphrases this story.
36. Liji zhengyi [Orthodox Commentary on the Book of History], comp. Kong Yingda, in Shisan jing zhu shu, ed. Li Xueqin, 27.836.
37. LNZ 1.9. citing Book of Songs (Shijing). Translation from Raphals, “A Woman Who Understood the Rites,” 279. This passage is not the only place Confucius praised Lady Ji of Lu. In Narrative of States, learning of the wise instruction she had given Wenbo’s concubines after her son’s death, Confucius remarked that “her wisdom is like that of a man.” See translation in Goldin, “The View of Women in Early Confucianism,” 141; cf. Guoyu 國語 [Narrative of States] (Shanghai: Shanghai guji, 1978), 5.211. For further background on the admiration of Confucius for Jing Jiang, on the debate as to the extent to which these contemporaries knew one another, on whether Wenbo was Confucius’s disciple, and on the nature of Confucius’s interaction with the Ji clan, see Raphals, “A Woman Who Understood the Rites.”
38. Ko, Teachers of the Inner Chambers, 13. As Goldin, in The Culture of Sex in Ancient China, puts it, “the precise contours of this dichotomy are hard to reconstruct” (59).
39. Raphals, “A Woman Who Understood the Rites,” 292.
41. LNZ 1.11. For a full translation of the biography of the mother of Mencius, see Nancy Gibbs’s translation, “The Mother of Mencius,” in Chinese Civilization: A Sourcebook, ed. Patricia Buckley Ebrey (New York: Free Press, 1993), 72–74. O’Hara, The Position of Women, 39–42, and Raphals, Sharing the Light, 33–35, have also translated this biography. For a short biography, see Constance Cook’s entry, “Mother of Mencius,” in Biographical Dictionary of Chinese Women, Antiquity Through Sui, 1600 BC–618 AD, ed. Lily Xiao Hong Lee and A. D. Stefanowska (Armonk, N.Y.: Sharpe, 2007), 46–47.
42. Hinsch, in “Textiles and Female Virtue,” remarks that “The industrious widow working at the loom to earn money for her son’s education was still praised as a moral paragon even though she sold her cloth” (179). The mother of Mencius serves as the perfect illustration of the “moralistic” and “virtuous” textile weaver in Confucian tradition.
43. Robin Wang, “Ideal Womanhood in Chinese Thought and Culture,” Philosophy Compass 5, no. 8 (2010): 637.
45. Raphals, “A Woman Who Understood the Rites,” 283.
46. Chiu-Duke, “Mothers and the Well-being of the State,” 59.
47. Ibid., 73. In a case of historical irony, the mother of Huan Yanfan, one of the conspirators who deposed Wu Zhao in 705, urged her son to go through with the coup, telling him: “When loyalty and filial piety cannot coexist, it is all right that you do your duty to the state first” (XTS 120.4313; Chiu-Duke, 76, translates this passage). For this mother, ministerial loyalty meant the repudiation of Wu Zhao’s Zhou and the restoration of the Tang. Chiu-Duke cites several other examples of Tang mothers who, as good Confucian matriarchs, conscientiously objected to their sons serving a female ruler. Her essay includes a subchapter titled “Resistance to Empress Wu,” 82–85.
48. QTW 196.1984. With the two-character surname Erzhu 爾朱, this woman likely heralded from a Xianbei/Toba background.
49. QTW 257.2608. Su Ting wrote the epitaph for the Lofty and Pacific Senior Princess (Gao’an changgongzhu, 649–714), Gaozong’s daughter by Pure Consort Xiao (Xiao shufei), Wu Zhao’s bitter rival for the emperor’s affections in the 650s.
51. Zhou, Festivals, Feasts, and Gender Relations, 246.
52. CG 2. Translation from Twitchett, “Chen Gui and Other Works,” 56.
55. Twitchett, “Chen Gui and Other Works,” 92.
56. Kam Louie, Theorizing Chinese Masculinity: Society and Gender in China (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 16, sees the Tang as a balanced era in the evolving wen-wu (civil-military) dyad that helped define Chinese masculinity.
57. Skaff, Sui-Tang China and Its Turko-Mongol Neighbors, 43–44, 308–09 (table A); cf. ZZTJ 202.6390–203.6443.
58. XTS chap. 110; JTS chap. 109: Wu Zhao’s non-Han generals included Koguryan expat Quan Xiancheng, Li Duozuo (Mohe), Shazha Zhongyi (Tujue), Qibi Heli (Tiele), and Heichi Changzhi (Paekche). This list includes some men who served as non-Han generals under Gaozong. Also see Zhang Naizhu, “Wu-Zhou Zhengquan,” 31–39. Zhang emphasizes the pivotal role of non-Han generals and the culture of the western borderlands in buttressing the political authority of female emperor Wu Zhao, further remarking that the female sovereign, in turn, utilized with great acuity the powerful influence of non-Han civilization and foreign ideologies to buttress her political might.
60. CG 54–56. See also O’Hara’s translation of Liu Xiang’s LNZ 1.10 in The Position of Women, 37–38.
61. Raphals, Sharing the Light, 40.
62. Her husband Zhao She and Lian Po were both renowned generals of the state of Zhao in the early third-century B.C.
63. The commentary in the CG notes that “those who face east avoid the southward gaze of the ruler” (57).
64. CG 56–58. See also O’Hara’s translation of Liu Xiang’s LNZ 3.15 in The Position of Women, 100–1. For a short biography, see Constance Cook’s entry “General Zhao Kuo’s Mother” in Lee and Stefanowska, Biographical Dictionary of Chinese Women, 26–27.
65. Twitchett, “Chen Gui and Other Works,” 97.
66. Bokenkamp, “A Medieval Feminist Critique,” 384; cf. “Gai yuan Guangzhai shewen” 改元光宅赦文, WYYH 463.2361.
68. JTS 6.115,119, 24.925; XTS 4.87, 76.3480; ZZTJ 204.6448. See chap. 2 of this volume for the importance of this stone in connecting Wu Zhao to the Luo River goddess.
69. Twitchett, “Chen Gui and Other Works,” 73–74.
71. Lü Huayu, “Wu Zetian ‘Chen Gui’ pouxi,” in Su Jian and Bai Xianzhang, Wu Zetian yu Luoyang, 90.
74. Possessing a wider, inclusive, and international vision of sovereignty, Wu Zhao extended the aegis of her motherhood to encompass not just ministers in court and generals in the field, but also her countless foreign subjects in Luoyang and Chang’an and throughout her vast realm. Wu Zhao’s extended vision of motherhood included these non-Han generals as well as her court ministers. As grand dowager and empress, Wu Zhao utilized the idea “come-as-sons” (zi lai 子來) to describe the willing and cheerful spirit in which her subjects, her political sons, gravitated to her. Lifted from the canonical Book of Songs, “come-as-sons” was first featured in a verse in which subjects thronged like cheerful and willing children to build in less than a day a ceremonial tower (lingtai 靈臺) for the virtuous founder of the Zhou dynasty of antiquity, King Wen. In 691, as emperor, when she ordered the construction of a hundred-foot-tall monument, an Axis of the Sky (Tianshu 天樞) in the heart of her Divine Capital Luoyang, she appointed a Koguryan expatriate, son of a former king of the defunct Korean state, to an unprecedented position, Come-as-Sons Commissioner of the Axis of the Sky (Tianshu zilai shi 天樞子來使). Non-Han Chinese merchants, chieftains, and dignitaries provided money and material to fund the project. The Axis of the Sky was eventually completed in 695, requiring more than four years (rather than under a day) to complete. For primary sources on this construction, see JTS 6.124, 89.2902; XTS 4.95; ZZTJ 205.6496; TPGJ 240.1850, 236.1816.
III. DRAWING ON THE NUMINOUS ENERGIES OF FEMALE DAOIST DIVINITIES
1. See, for instance, Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching, 85 (I.28).
5. Kristofer Schipper, The Taoist Body, trans. Karen C. Duval (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 139.
6. Schafer, The Divine Woman, 43.
7. THY 50.877. See Charles Benn, The Cavern-Mystery Transmission: A Daoist Ordination Rite of A.D. 711 (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1991), 10–11.
8. Shangshu zhengyi, 295. See Rothschild, “An Inquiry into Reign Era Changes Under Wu Zhao,” 130–31.
9. The Shizi is a twenty-chapter Warring States–era text attributed to Legalist Shi Jiao.
11. Barrett, Taoism Under the T’ang, 40–41.
12. Edward Schafer, “Hallucinations and Epiphanies in T’ang Poetry,” Journal of the American Oriental Society 104, no. 4 (1984): 757–58.
13. Edward Schafer, “Three Divine Women of South China,” Chinese Literature: Essays, Articles, and Reviews 1 (1979): 31.
14. For a description of the Li family background, see Wechsler, “The Founding of the T’ang Dynasty,” 150–52. For more on Tang attitudes toward non-Chinese, see Abramson, Ethnic Identity in Tang China.
15. Barrett, Taoism Under the T’ang, 20.
16. Benn, Cavern-Mystery Transmission, 10.
8. THE QUEEN MOTHER OF THE WEST AND WU ZHAO
1. Suzanne Cahill, Transcendence and Divine Passion: The Queen Mother of the West in Medieval China (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993), 14.
2. Elfriede Knauer, “The Queen Mother of the West: A Study of the Influence of Western Prototypes on the Iconography of the Taoist Deity,” in Contact and Exchange in the Ancient World, ed. Victor Mair (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2006), 63. Curiously, Knauer traces the Queen Mother of the West to far earlier origins (at least iconographic origins) as western Asian and greater Mediterranean deity Kybele.
3. Cahill, Transcendence and Divine Passion, 13–15. In the opening chapter, Cahill provides a much more comprehensive account of the evolution and development of this deity. See also Cahill, Divine Traces of the Daoist Sisterhood (Magdalena, N.Mex.: Three Pines, 2006), 43–69; and Michael Loewe, Ways to Paradise: The Chinese Quest for Immortality (Boston: Allen and Unwin, 1979), 88–97.
4. Birrell, Chinese Mythology, 172; cf. “Xici sanjing” 西次三經, in Shanhai jing, 2.19. Also see Cahill, Transcendence and Divine Passion, 15–16.
5. Anne Birrell, “Gendered Power: A Discourse on Female-Gendered Myth in the Classic of Mountains and Seas,” Sino-Platonic Papers no. 120 (July 2002): 11, 13.
7. Hinsch, Women in Early Imperial China, 2.
8. Birrell, Chinese Mythology, 144–45.
9. Loewe, Ways to Paradise, 95, 121.
11. Mu-chou Poo, In Search of Personal Welfare: A View of Ancient Chinese Religion (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998), 155–56, cf. HS 27.1476–77.
12. Suzanne Cahill, “Beside the Turquoise Pond: the Shrine of the Queen Mother of the West in Medieval Chinese Poetry and Religious Practice,” Journal of Chinese Religions 12 (1984), 25–26. See JS 129.3197–98; SS 71.1657.
13. James Hargett, “Playing Second Fiddle: The Luan-Bird in Early and Medieval Chinese Literature,” T’oung Pao, Second Series, 75 (1989): 253.
14. Loewe, Ways to Paradise, 15; and Yu Yingshi, “New Evidence on the Early Chinese Conception of Afterlife—A Review Article,” Journal of Asian Studies 41, no. 1 (1981): 81–85.
15. E. D. Edwards, Chinese Prose Literature of the T’ang Period, vol. 2 (London: Arthur Probsthain, 1938), 3, 97, translated from Tai Shangyin’s 太上隱 Tang-era Biographies of Immortal Officers (Xianli zhuan 仙吏傳).
16. Birrell, Chinese Mythology, 174–75.
17. Loewe, Ways to Paradise, 116–20. Loewe includes translations from the Bowuzhi 博物志 (third century or later), the Han Wu gushi 漢武故事, and the Han Wudi neizhuan 漢武帝內傳 (sixth century).
18. Henri Frankfurt, Kingship and the Gods (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1948), 297.
19. Marianne Bujard, “Le culte de Wangzi Qiao ou la longue carrière d’un immortel,” Études chinoises 19 (2000): 115–16.
20. Wu Hung, The Wu Liang Shrine, chap. 4, “The Gables: The World of Immortality,” 108–41.
21. Nancy Thompson, “The Evolution of the T’ang Lion and Grapevine Mirror,” Artibus Asiae 29, no. 1 (1967): 27.
24. Li Fubu, “Gudai ming nüzi,” 72.
25. Cahill, Transcendence and Divine Passion, 58.
26. Cahill, “Performers and Female Daoist Adepts,” 155.
27. Shanhai jing, book 2, chap. 3, p. 24. Apparently this is an alternate residence to Kunlun.
28. Cahill, Transcendence and Divine Passion, 15–16.
29. Cahill, Divine Traces of the Daoist Sisterhood, 57; cf. Yunji qiqian (Beijing: Xinhua, 1996), 114.721 (hereafter YJQQ).
30. Loewe, Ways to Paradise, 100.
31. JTS 37.1374; XTS 35.914. The date is given as 675 in the XTS. TPGJ 404.3254 indicates that the presentation of the rings did not occur during Wu Zhao’s reign but at a later date. Edward Schafer, The Golden Peaches of Samarkand (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1963), 36, also refers to these rings. Chuzhou is in modern-day Jiangsu.
32. TPGJ 203.1530. The guan is a ritual tube akin to the cong 琮, an instrument shamans used to commune with spirits.
33. Forte, Mingtang and Buddhist Utopias, 16–18.
34. JTS 5.102. For further connections between the phoenix and Wu Zhao, see Rothschild, “Wu Zhao’s Remarkable Aviary,” 72–76. Chenzhou (near modern-day Huaiyang, Henan, about 100 miles southwest of Luoyang) was associated with Fuxi, Divine Farmer Shennong, and Emperor Shun.
35. Wu Hung, The Wu Liang Shrine, 111.
36. Loewe, Ways to Paradise, 124–25, 155n200; the passage is cited in Li Daoyuan’s sixth-century Commentary on the Classic of Waterways (Shuijing zhu 水經注), attributed to Dongfang Shuo’s Classic on Divine Marvels (Shenyijing 神異經). Loewe notes that it is thought to be a later production.
37. In the “Zhou yu” 周語 [Discourses of Zhou] in the Guoyu [Narrative of States] (chapter 1) it is the call of the yuezhuo 鸑鷟, a not yet fully fledged phoenix (in other sources, a purple phoenix or simply an alternative designation for a phoenix), from Mount Qishan that heralded the advent of the original Zhou dynasty.
38. JTS 22.862; THY 11.277; ZZTJ 204.6454. See also Forte, Mingtang and Buddhist Utopias, 156–58.
39. TD 44.254; JTS 22.867; THY 11.279; ZZTJ 205.6505.
40. Loewe, Ways to Paradise, 97.
41. Loewe, Ways to Paradise, 120. The Queen Mother’s sheng headdress appears in other capacities as well. Worn on the Day of Humans (Ren ri 人日), the sheng appears to have been apotropaic, more closely associated with driving off demons than with sericulture. A text compiled in the Liang court in the sixth century, Annals of the States of Jing and Chu (Jing-Chu sui shiji 荊楚歲時記), recorded that beginning in the Jin, on the Day of Humans, the seventh day of the seventh lunar month, a date also connected to the Weaver Girl and Oxherd Boy, people in the southern reaches fashioned sheng headdresses for each other modeled after the Queen Mother’s coronal flora.
Loewe (119) and Michael Como, in Weaving and Binding: Immigrant Gods and Female Immortals in Ancient Japan (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2009), 105, have both translated part of this passage. Loewe (120) has also translated a short section of the Composition of Pearls (Bianzhu 編珠), a Sui-era encyclopedia compiled on imperial order by Du Gongzhan, which similarly claims the sheng originated in the Jin. This text contained an excerpt from a third-century text that said sheng “were shaped like the golden sheng of charms. In addition they depicted the visit paid by the Queen Mother of the West, wearing her sheng, to [Han] Wudi.”
Elfreide Knauer (“The Queen Mother of the West,” 64, 75), provides a radically different understanding of the sheng, contending that the Chinese may have “misunderstood and interpreted” iconographic representations of the high-backed throne of western Asian and Mediterranean goddess Kybele as a loom to fit the Queen Mother of the West’s role as weaver of the universe.
42. Loewe, Ways to Paradise, 105, citing Kominami Ichiro, Chugoku no shinwa to monogatari [Chinese Stories and Legends] (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1984), 47. Como, in Weaving and Binding, has remarked that the “Queen Mother of the West, whose main iconographic attribute was a weaving instrument that served as her headdress, was also closely associated with sericulture and the figure of the Weaver Maiden” (214). For more on the meaning of the sheng headdress, see Cahill, Transcendence and Divine Passion, 16, 249n8.
44. JTS 4.75, 5.92, 98, 100; XTS 3.57, 67, 71; TD 46.1290. See also chap. 3 in this volume.
45. Wang, Shaping the Lotus Sutra, 148.
46. Wu Hung, “Bird Motifs in Eastern Yi Art,” Orientations 16, no. 10 (1985), 30–32.
47. Loewe, Ways to Paradise, 52, 103. The iconography of low-relief sculpture and images on TLV mirrors often shows these symbolic creatures of the celestial bodies and sometimes, as in the case of the famous T-shaped Mawangdui funerary banner from the second century B.C., depicts both. Loewe (128) suggests that the three-legged sunbird (an iconographic motif well established by the first century B.C.) may represent an evolution (a consolidation into a single body) of the Queen Mother’s trio of avian messengers from earlier tradition.
49. In Weaving and Binding, Michael Como has illustrated that along the Korean peninsula and in the nascent Japanese state in the sixth and seventh centuries, the Queen Mother’s solar crow was a recurring motif. Como (100–1) translates a passage from the Nihon Shoki 日本書紀, an early eighth-century history, recording a remark from a Buddhist monk in Emperor Kōtoku’s 孝德 (r. 645–654) court that the Great Tang had at an early juncture sent an emissary bearing a dead three-legged sunbird. In 701, during the reign of Emperor Monmu 文武 (r. 697–707), Wu Zhao’s contemporary, a three-legged peacock was presented in court and a sunbird banner was erected at the gate of the main audience hall. Como takes this to indicate that “elements of the symbolic vocabulary of the Queen Mother” had become integrated into the Japanese court (102).
50. TPGJ 462.3796. It is problematic to tell whether this passage, originally from Miscellaneous Morsels from Youyang (Youyang zazu 酉陽雜俎) refers to the same presentation of a three-legged bird or to two separate presentations. Wu Zhao assumed the title Celestial Empress in 674, but in 688 she became Sage Mother, Divine Sovereign. In 690, when she established her Zhou dynasty, she took the title Sagely and Divine Emperor. This makes the passage difficult because by 690, the date given in the Taiping guangji episode, she was no longer known as Celestial Empress.
51. ZZTJ 204.6263–64; XTS 76.3481; QTW 96.996.
52. Shi Anchang, “Cong yuanzang tuoben tanguo tan Wu Zetian zao zi” [A Discussion of the Characters Created by Wu Zetian Based on an Investigation of Rubbings in the Palace Museum Archives], Gugong bowuyuan yuankan, no. 4 (1983), 37.
53. Li Jingjie, “Guanyu Wu Zetian xinzi de jidian renshi” [Several Points About the New Characters of Wu Zetian], Gugong bowuyuan yuankan no. 4 (1997), 60.
54. See Cahill, “Performers and Female Daoist Adepts,” 156.
55. For a summary of the widespread availability and use of cosmetics in Tang China, see Charles Benn, Daily Life in Traditional China: The Tang Dynasty (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 2002), 109–12.
56. ZZTJ 205.6487. XTS 76.3482 contains a similar passage, which mentions that two teeth regrew. There is no bing-xu day in the ninth month of 692. The purported regrowth of the tooth likely either occurred on the bing-shen 丙申 day (19 October 692) or the wu-xu 戊戌 day (22 October 692).
57. ZZTJ 206.6546. JTS 6.129 suggests that the potion was more efficacious, recording that the new reign era began because “she recovered from illness.”
58. Modified from Tao Te Ching, 120 (II.59).
60. See, for instance, Barrett, Taoism Under the T’ang, 44–45.
61. Wang, Shaping the Lotus Sutra, 149. He contends that another cause was her disappointment with the political capital of “ostentatious Buddhist trappings stage-managed by Xue Huaiyi.”
62. JTS 5.110; THY 7.102.
63. JTS 6.119; XTS 4.87; ZZTJ 204.6449.
64. Translation is modified from Cahill, Transcendence and Divine Passion, 217; cf. QTS 167.
65. Cahill, Divine Traces of the Daoist Sisterhood, 51. Cahill’s translation of Yongcheng jixian lu from YJQQ 114.721 has been slightly modified.
66. YJQQ 114.721; TPGJ 70.435–36. Both sources contain a famous episode in which a group of ten ill-intentioned monks came to harm the Immortal Maiden of the Gou clan and to burn and desecrate Wei Huacun’s shrine. Though the guardian woman sat quietly on her bed, the monks were unable to see her. A deep rumbling from the earth scared the monks off. As they ran through the forest, nine of ten were devoured by tigers.
69. Based on the textual understanding of Daoist hagiographer Du Guangting, Wang Hongjie, in Power and Politics in Tenth Century China: The Former Shu Regime (Amherst, N.Y.: Cambria, 2011), 165, renders this cultic Daoist immortal’s name as Wang Zijin, rather than Prince Jin. In his efforts to legitimize Wang Jian (r. 907–918) and the royal house of Shu in the early tenth century, Du compiled a collection of fifty-five Daoist immortals all with the surname Wang in the aptly titled Immortals and Gods of the Wang Clan (Wangshi shenxian zhuan 王氏神仙傳). Du Guangting forced Prince Jin into this collection, willfully taking the wang 王 for “prince” as a surname that matched that of his patron-ruler Wang Jian.
70. Edward Schafer, “Empyreal Powers and Chthonian Edens: Two Notes on T’ang Taoist Literature,” Journal of the American Oriental Society 106, no. 4 (1986): 667.
71. QTW 98.1007–08. See also TPGJ 4.24, taken from Liu Xiang’s Biographies of Immortals. Prince Jin’s (Qiao’s) brief biography has been translated; see Franciscus Verellen, Nathan Sivin, and Kristofer Schipper’s rendering in “Daoist Religion,” in de Bary and Bloom, Sources of Chinese Tradition, 394–95.
73. Bujard, “Le culte de Wangzi Qiao,” 115–55. Bujard traces the evolution of the cult of Wangzi Jin from the Han, through the North and South Dynasties, and into the Tang. While Bujard (146) notes Prince Jin “retrouvait un patronage imperial” under Wu Zhao, she only draws on two passages from the Old Tang History (JTS 6.128 and 23.891), and does not mention the Zhang brothers, who were at the center of the cult of Prince Jin’s revival.
76. ZZTJ 206.6539. Curiously, during this outing, courtier Yan Chaoyin prayed on Wu Zhao’s behalf when she was feeling under the weather (JTS 78.2706). He cleansed himself and, lying on a ritual meat stand, offered his very life in her stead. When she felt better, he was richly rewarded (ZZTJ 206.6538).
77. The stele still exists. Kegasawa Yasunori, Sokuten buko [Empress Wu Zetian] (Tokyo: Hakuteisha, 1995), 318, contains an illustration of the characters. See also Wang Zhendong and Xu Yingxian, “Wu Zetian ‘Shengxiantaizibei’ de shufa yishu” [Calligraphy and Art on Wu Zetian’s Stele of the Ascended Immortal Crown Prince], in Zhao Wenrun and Liu Zhiqing, Wu Zetian yu Yanshi, 240–44.
78. For a more extensive analysis of the structure of the preface to the inscription, see Wang Jingyao, Wu Zetian yu Shengxian taizi bei [Wu Zetian and the Stele of the Ascended Immortal Crown Prince], unpublished manuscript, Luoyang, 2003.
80. Van Gulik, Sexual Life in Ancient China, 158.
81. JTS 78.2706–08 (biography); XTS 104.4014–16 (biography); ZZTJ 206.6514. In the Old Tang History, the biography of the Zhangs disparages their literary skills, suggesting that most of the works attributed to them were in fact ghostwritten by literary masters like Song Zhiwen and Yan Chaoyin.
The Tang histories are not consistent as to whether the Zhangs both were born of the same mother (JTS) or two different mothers (XTS; ZZTJ).
82. ZZTJ 206. 6526–27, 6538. The precise timing of the establishment of the institute is not clear. In 700, the Institute of Reining Cranes was renamed the Garrison of Imperial Bodyguards (Fengchen fu 奉宸府).
83. ZZTJ 206.6546; JTS 78.2706–07; XTS 104.4014, 206.5840; TPGJ 188.1406. In TPGJ 240.1854, an anecdote drawn from the Chaoye jianzai indicates that Wu Sansi wrote a biography of Zhang Yizhi, contending that he (and not his brother, Changzong) was the incarnation of Prince Jin.
84. TPGJ 405.3267. This passage also contains a curious anecdote in which staunch Confucian minister Di Renjie (630–700) entered the inner palace to find Changzong clad in the gaudy, colorful cloak, engaged in a game of backgammon with Wu Zhao. The female emperor bid Di Renjie be seated and play a game with Zhang Changzong. When asked to determine the stakes, Di Renjie offered to stake his purple chief minister’s robes against the flock of kingfishers cloak. When Wu Zhao pointed out the tremendous value of Changzong’s robe, the stalwart minister retorted, “This robe of your humble minister is a garment one wears to court when memorializing the throne. Changzong’s clothing, however, is a garment worn by favorites and flatterers. Swayed by his persuasive argument, Wu Zhao then granted the wager. Zhang Changzong, having listened to Di Renjie’s argument, felt out of sorts and lost the backgammon match. Di Renjie left with the precious flock of kingfishers cloak, which, upon reaching a city gate, he gave to a slave. Also see Schafer, Vermilion Bird, 114, 307n87.
86. Ding Lingwei was a Jin-era Daoist recluse from northeastern China, known for having transformed into an immortal crane.
87. A reference to the Nine Tripods cast for Wu Zhao’s court in 697. See ZZTJ 206.6517.
88. Slight modification of Charles Stone’s translation from The Fountainhead of Chinese Erotica (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2003), 90, c.f. QTS 68.767. This is not the entirety of the poem. In an abbreviated version, four stanzas of Cui Rong’s poem appear in the biography of the Zhangs in the Old Tang History (78.2706) and also in the Ming dynasty erotic novella The Lord of Perfect Satisfaction. Stone sees the poem as subtly insinuating that Zhang Changzong “should enjoy his odious status as Wu Zetian’s paramour while he can,” because such favor, far from immortal, is transient.
In TPGJ 240.1854, a chapter on “sycophants and favorites,” Cui Rong is mentioned as being the most shamelessly fawning of the sycophants poetically toadying to the Zhangs. In TPGJ 250.1935, the poem is attributed to Zhang Changling 張昌齡 (d. 705), who presented it to his brother, rather than Cui Rong.
89. JTS 78.2706–07; XTS 104.4014–15; ZZTJ 206.6546.
91. Jeanne Larsen, Willow, Wine, Mirror, Moon: Women’s Poems from Tang China (Rochester, N.Y.: BOA Editions, 2005), 25. I have slightly modified Larsen’s translation from QTS 5.58.
93. Franciscus Verellen, “The Beyond Within: Grotto-Heavens (dongtian) in Taoist Ritual and Cosmology,” Les Cahiers d’Extrême-Asie 8 (1995): 289. Also see Miura Kunio’s tables in the “dongtian and fudi” entry in Predagio, Encyclopedia of Taoism, 370 (table 5).
95. Curiously, as a prime minister of Wu Zhao’s grandson Xuanzong, Yao Chong would assume a very different tone, taking on a Confucian conservative voice. Despite the free-flowing Daoist airs of this verse from early in his political career, he later played a significant role in the erasure of Wu Zhao.
96. Cahill, Transcendence and Divine Passion, 132–33. Translation is Cahill’s. I have only converted the Wade-Giles to pinyin. This is not the full poem, only the final four lines.
97. A zhang was about 2.46 meters during the Tang.
98. QTS 80.867. The commentary in the QTS suggests this poem should be attributed to literary master Song Zhiwen or Yan Chaoyin, rather than to Zhang Yizhi. See also Cahill’s translation in Transcendence and Divine Passion, 133.
99. Cahill, “Performers and Female Daoist Adepts,” 164.
100. Jia Jinhua, “A Study of the Jinglong Wenguan ji,” Monumenta Serica 47 (1999): 231.
101. QTS 103.1090. Translation from Jia Jinhua, “Jinglong Wenguanji,” 232.
9. THE MOTHER OF LAOZI AND WU ZHAO
2. Catherine Despeux, “Women and Daoism,” in Kohn, Daoism Handbook, 385.
3. Peter Nickerson, “The Southern Celestial Masters,” in Kohn, Daoism Handbook, 272. In the worldview of Celestial Masters that developed during the Southern dynasties, the dark, primordial, and inaugural qi emerged from the void, transforming to take the shape of the Jade Maiden of Mystery and Wonder, who begot Laozi, who in turn, being a cosmic and divine power, generated the universe.
4. These stages are drawn from Catherine Despeux and Livia Kohn, Women in Daoism (Cambridge, Mass.: Three Pines, 2003), 49; see also Livia Kohn, The Taoist Experience: An Anthology (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993), 116. YJQQ 114.721 does not include a biography for the mother of Laozi, although it records that she, the Holy Mother goddess, taught the Mysterious Girl of the Nine Heavens (Jiutian xuannü 九天玄女).
5. Translation from Anna Seidel, La divinisation de Lao-tseu sous les Han (Paris: Ecole Francaise d’Extreme-Orient, 1969), 61.
6. Schipper, The Taoist Body, 117–18.
7. Anna Seidel, “Tokens of Immortality in Han Graves,” Numen 29, no. 1 (1986): 106. I have abbreviated the title.
8. Translation from Seidel, “Tokens of Immortality,” 106. I have added characters and changed the Wade-Giles to pinyin.
9. Charles Benn, “Taoism as Ideology in the Reign of Emperor Hsuan-Tsung (712–755)” (PhD diss., University of Michigan, 1977), 4. As a mortal ancestor, Laozi was not considered the first ancestor of the Li imperial family, who traced their origins back much further—to Zhuanxu of remote antiquity (XTS 70.1956). Beginning with the Shandong Li clan in the Western Han, various Lis had drawn kin connections to the Daoist sage.
12. Kirkland and Kohn, “Daoism in the Tang,” 340.
14. Benn, “Taoism as Ideology,” 24.
16. Benn, Cavern-Mystery Transmission, 105. See below for more on the 662 sighting.
17. Benn, “Taoism as Ideology,” 8–9. Benn (19) remarks that this divine Laozi was not only “preceptor to sage-kings and good rulers” but a messianic sage and savior capable of restoring harmony and stability.
18. JTS 3.48. Bozhou is in Luyi, Henan.
19. ZZTJ 201.6343; XTS 76.3475–76.
20. ZZTJ 201.6347; Hu Sanxing wrote his commentary on the Comprehensive Mirror in the early Yuan. TD 53.1478 records, “In Qianfeng 1 (666) of the Great Tang, Laojun was posthumously designated Grand Superior Emperor of Mysterious Origin.” THY 50.865 records that the posthumous honorific designation was made on the twentieth day of the third lunar month.
21. XTS 3.65. According to JTS 5.90, a new temple was created in Zhenyuan County, with a director and an aide installed to properly administer the site. The change of name from Guyang to Zhenyuan is also recorded in XTS 38.990. See also Twitchett, “Chen Gui and Other Works,” 81; and Victor Cunrui Xiong, “Ritual Innovation and Taoism Under Tang Xuanzong,” T’oung Pao, Second Series, 82 (1996): 282.
22. QTW 933.9715. Xu Lishi was a grandson of the renowned early Tang general Xu Shao (d. 621), who befriended Tang founder Gaozu. See the Xus’ joint biography in JTS 59.2327–30 and XTS 90.3770–72.
23. Daode zhenjing guangsheng yi 道德真經廣聖義 [Broad and Sacred Teachings of the Perfected Book on the Dao and Its Virtue], comp. Du Guangting, Daozang 725, 2.19a–21.
24. Benn, “Taoism as Ideology,” 47. I have changed Wade-Giles to pinyin.
25. QTW 12.151. As mentioned, Du Guangting reported a different title, Hunyuan huangdi 混元皇帝, in contrast to Gaozong’s yuanyuan huangdi 元元皇帝. JTS 5.90 indicates that the original title was Taishang xuanyuan huangdi 太上玄元皇帝. Du Guangting’s term “Hunyuan huangdi” is curious. Two centuries after Du Guangting, Song emperor Zhenzong (r. 997–1022) did present Laozi a title that can be reduced to Hunyuan huangdi—Taishang Laojun hunyuan shangde huangdi 太上老君混元上德皇帝. This title inspired Xie Shouhao (1134–1212) to name his hagiography for Laozi “Hunyuan shengji” 混元聖紀 (Records of the Sage of Nebulous Origin). It is possible that Du Guangting originally used the title Xuanyuan huangdi 玄元皇帝, but that it was emended to Hunyuan huangdi 混元皇帝 when his text was edited in the Song at some juncture after Zhenzong honored Laozi with the new title.
26. Benn, “Taoism as Ideology,” 44–45.
27. Rothschild, Wu Zhao, 70, 77–78.
28. Bokenkamp, “A Medieval Feminist Critique,” 387.
29. Translation of Beiji as “Northern Culmen” is drawn from Schafer, Pacing the Void, 44.
30. The Golden Terrace (Jintai 金臺) is associated with the Queen Mother of the West and Mount Kunlun. According to THY 50.869, in the third year of Chuigong (687), Wu Zhao as grand dowager changed the Longxing Observatory to Golden Terrace Observatory. According to TPYL 1.1 and 38.182, citing Records of the Ten Continents (Shizhou ji 十洲記), atop Mount Kunlun there are the “Golden Terrace and the Jade Pillars, where the primal pneumas are harmonized—this is the locale from which the Heavenly Emperor ruled.” TPYL 811.3605 cites the Inner Biographies of the Pass Guardian (Guanling neizhuan 關令內傳), in which Laozi climbs Mount Kunlun and ascends the Golden Terrace.
31. The Western Mount is Mount Kunlun.
32. QTW 220.2220. Translation of this paragraph draws heavily on Bokenkamp’s translation (“A Medieval Feminist Critique,” 388).
33. Barrett, Taoism Under the T’ang, 38–40.
34. For a more complete account of these reforms, see ZZTJ 203.6421 and QTW 96.995; for secondary sources, see Guisso, “The Reigns of the Empress Wu, Chung-tsung and Jui-tsung,” 292; and Rothschild, Wu Zhao, 86–87.
35. Guozhou was located near the Lingbao in modern-day Henan, about 100 miles west of Luoyang.
36. After the Tang restoration, Wu Yuanchong, heralding from Hongzhou, was posthumously honored for his loyalty during Xuanzong’s reign. See QTW 36.393.
37. QTW 933.9715, Du Guangting, Lidai chongdao ji. This “Lord Lao miracle” is also discussed briefly in Kirkland and Kohn, “Daoism in the Tang,” 345.
38. Rothschild, Wu Zhao, 86.
39. Yang Liu, “Images for the Temple,” 254.
40. Barrett, Taoism Under the T’ang, 39–40. On the timing of the bestowal of this title, see Forte, Political Propaganda, 301n214.
42. QTW 96.995. Wang Pu in THY (50.878) records Wu Zhao’s decision to honor Laozi’s wife as Grand Dowager of the Anterior Heaven in the ninth month of 684. Curiously, Du You (TD 53.1478) makes the same error.
43. XTS 4.87; JTS 6.119; ZZTJ 204.6448.
44. Gu Zhengmei, “Wu Zetian de Huayan jing,” 279–321.
49. Xiong, “Ritual Innovation and Taoism,” 281, based on QTW 24.280–81. There is some debate as to the motivation behind Xuanzong’s elevating the cult of Laozi. Whereas Charles Benn (“Taoism as Ideology”) contends that Xuanzong’s promotion of Daoism and worship of Laozi “was intended to serve his political and ideological ends,” Xiong suggests that Xuanzong’s ritual innovations in the early 740s were more personal than political, related to his “quest for immortality through the help of celestial power” (305).
51. For the turbulent years when the Taiping Princess, the Anle Princess, and Empress Wei dominated the court, see ZZTJ, chaps. 207–209. See also Guisso, “The Reigns of Empress Wu, Chung-tsung and Jui-tsung,” 321–29.
52. Richard Kagan, “The Chinese Approach to Shamanism,” Chinese Sociology and Anthropology 12, no. 4 (1980): 4–5.
53. Schipper, The Taoist Body, 125.
10. REJECTED FROM THE PANTHEON
1. See James Robson, Power of Place: The Religious Landscape of the Southern Sacred Peak in Medieval China, Harvard East Asian Monographs no. 316 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2009), 373–75.
2. Cahill, Transcendence and Divine Passion, 183–89; also “The Daoist Goddess: The Queen Mother of the West,” in Wang, Images of Women, 348, 362–65.
3. Isabel Robinet, Taoism: Growth of a Religion (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), 116.
4. Kirkland and Kohn, “Daoism in the Tang,” 387.
5. Robson, Power of Place, 203. Robson examines the “elusive” and unstable nature of the term “Southern Marchmount”—a location initially defined as Huoshan in modern-day Anhui, but which later became strongly identified with Mount Hengshan 衡山 in Hunan.
6. It is beyond the scope of this chapter to provide a full biography of Lady Wei. For more biographical background, see Robson, Power of Place, 184–212, 373–75; Despeux and Kohn, Women in Daoism, 14–15; Idema and Grant, The Red Brush, 159–60; Despeux, “Women and Daoism,” 387–88; Robinet, Taoism, 115–16.
7. For a succinct description of the texts, beliefs, and practices associated with the Shangqing tradition, see Isabelle Robinet, “Shangqing,” in Predagio, Encyclopedia of Taoism, 858–66.
8. Barrett, Taoism Under the T’ang, 34–35.
10. JTS 5.99 for the titular change. See also Rothschild, Wu Zhao, 65–66; Barrett, Taoism Under the T’ang, 36–37; Kirkland and Kohn, “Daoism in the Tang,” 343.
11. Kirkland and Kohn, “Daoism in the Tang,” 340.
13. Barrett, Taoism Under the T’ang, 35.
17. JTS 5.110. Chao Fu and Xu You were celebrated Daoist renunciants mentioned in the works of Laozi, Zhuangzi, Ge Hong, and others.
18. Robson, Power of Place, 198–200.
19. Chen Jinhua, Philosopher, Practitioner, Politician, 373n26.
20. Paul Kroll, “Daoist Verse and the Quest for the Divine,” in Early Chinese Religion, part 2, The Period of Division (220–589), ed. John Lagerway and Lü Pengzhi (Leiden: Brill, 2010), 976. According to JTS 39.1489–90, in 627, boundaries and nomenclature were altered and Xiuwu became part of Huaizhou after Taizong pacified various rivals in the region.
21. Ibid., 977. See also Robson, Power of Place, 199; and Gil Raz, “Daoist Sacred Geography,” in Lagerway and Lü Pengzhi, Early Chinese Religion, part 2, 1436. Most biographies of Wei Huacun contain the account of the visitation of the four perfected ones and Lady Wei’s subsequent purification on Mount Wangwu—see TPGJ 58; QTW 259 and 340.
22. Xiong, Emperor Yang, 77.
23. JTS 4.77, 38.1424; XTS 38.981, 39.1010.
25. Cahill, Transcendence and Divine Passion, 60.
26. See Sima Chengzhen’s Tiandi gongfu tu 天地宮府圖 (Chart of the Palaces and Bureaus of the Grotto-Heavens and the Blissful Lands) in YJQQ 27.153; and Miura Kunio, “Grotto Heavens and Blissful Lands,” in Predagio, Encyclopedia of Taoism, 369.
27. Gil Raz, “Wangwu,” in Predagio, Encyclopedia of Taoism, 1026.
28. Cahill, Transcendence and Divine Passion, 121; cf. QTS 282.
29. QTW 934.9723–24. The “Biography of the Yellow Emperor” (Xuanyuan benji 軒轅本記) in YJQQ 100.612 mentions that the mythic sovereign discovered a secret tract on divine elixirs and the Nine Tripods atop Mount Wangwu. Also see Charles Benn, “Du Guangting,” in Predagio, Encyclopedia of Taoism, 387.
30. The biography of Sima Chengzhen in Li Bo’s 李渤 (773–831) Genealogies of the Perfected (Zhenxi 真系) in the YJQQ 5.27 identifies him as belonging to Mount Wangwu.
32. Kirkland and Kohn, “Daoism in the Tang,” 347.
33. Slightly modified from Forte, Political Propaganda, 317. See part IV of this volume for a more thorough treatment and contextualization of this work.
34. Robson, Power of Place, 199.
35. Ibid. The preface to the inscription with this title is contained in QTW 259.2629, and in Daojia jinshi lue [A Summary of Daoist Inscriptions], comp. Chen Yuan (Beijing: Wenwu, 1988), chap. 77; and Jinshi cuibian [A Miscellany of Choice Inscriptions on Metal and Stone], comp. Wang Chang (Beijing: Zhongguo shudian, 1985), chap. 60.
36. XTS 36.937 and TPGJ 143.1025 note that this ill-omened sheatfish was discovered in 692—hidden in the woodwork—prophetically anticipating Lu being implicated and killed several years later.
37. Otagi Hajime, “Nangyaku Gi fujin shinko no hensen” [The Development in the Belief of Lady Wei of the Southern Marchmount], in Rikucho dokyo no kenkyu [Research on Daoism in the Six Dynasties Period], Research Report of the Institute for Research in Humanities, ed. Yoshikawa Tadao (Kyoto: Kyoto University, 1998), 383.
38. Otagi Hajime, “Nangyaku Gi fujin,” 382–83.
39. JTS 189.4962; XTS 199.5665.
40. Kamitsuka Yoshiko, “Sokuten buko ki no dokyo” [Taoism During the Period of the Dowager-Empress Wu Zetian’s Reign], in Todai no Shukyo [Religion in the Tang Dynasty], Research Report of the Institute for Research in Humanities, ed. Yoshikawa Tadao (Kyoto: Kyoto University, 2000), 252.
41. Otagi Hajime, “Nangyaku Gi fujin,” 383–85.
42. Yoshikawa Tadao, Sho to Dokyo no shuhen [Texts and the Parameters of Daoism] (Tokyo: Heibonsha, 1987), 125–239; Edward Schafer, “The Restoration of the Shrine of Wei Hua-ts’un at Lin-ch’uan in the Early Eighth Century,” Journal of Oriental Studies 15 (1977): 124–37; Russell Kirkland, “Huang Ling-wei: A Taoist Priestess in T’ang China,” Journal of Chinese Religions 19 (1991): 47–73; Kirkland, Taoism: The Enduring Tradition (London: Routledge, 2004), 139–40; Suzanne Cahill, “Hua Gu,” chap. 17 in Divine Traces of the Daoist Sisterhood, 119–26; Cahill, “Practice Makes Perfect: Paths to Transcendence for Women in Medieval China,” Taoist Resources 2, no. 2 (1990): 23–42.
43. Amy McNair, The Upright Brush: Yan Zhenqing’s Calligraphy and Song Literati Politics (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1998), chaps. 4–5.
44. Ibid., 83. See also Schafer, “The Restoration of the Shrine,” 126, 135.
45. Schafer, “The Restoration of the Shrine,” 129.
46. Yan Zhenqing, “Inscription for the Immortal Altar of Flower Maid of Well Mountain, Linchuan County in Fuzhou” (QTW 340.3444–45) and “Immortal Altar Stele Inscription of Lady Wei of Jin, Lady of the Southern Marchmount, Primal Mistress of Purple Tenuity, mandated Most Highly Realized Supervisor of Destinies” (QTW 340.3451–54). Russell Kirkland (“Huang Ling-wei,” 47–73) has translated Yan Zhenqing’s inscription honoring the Huang Lingwei. Yoshikawa Tadao, Sho to Dokyo (107–61) has also looked exhaustively at both inscriptions. Schafer (“The Restoration of the Shrine,” 129–37) has translated the fifty-two four-syllable lines at the end of Yan Zhenqing’s inscription for Wei Huacun, accompanying the translation with commentary drawn from Yan’s much longer prefatory prose inscription.
47. Despeux and Kohn place Huang Lingwei in their chapter on “Medieval Renunciants,” Women in Daoism, 124–25.
48. Cahill, in “Hua Gu,” chap. 17 in Divine Traces of the Daoist Sisterhood (119–26), has translated the entirety of Du Guangting’s biography of Huang Lingwei from YJQQ chap. 115.
49. Schafer, “Restoration of the Shrine,” 135.
51. Cahill, “Practice Makes Perfect,” 24–25.
52. This site is west of the Linru River near Stone Well Mountain (Shijingshan 石井山). See Kirkland, “Huang Ling-wei,” 48–52; Kamitsuka Yoshiko, “Sokuten buko ki no dokyo,” 252; Rothschild, “Rhetoric, Ritual and Support Constituences,” chap. 5. For the primary source accounts of the discovery and repair of Wei Huacun’s tomb during the Tang, see YJQQ 115.725 (translation in Cahill, Divine Traces of the Daoist Sisterhood, 124); and QTW 340 (Yan Zhenqing’s inscription for Huang Lingwei’s shrine).
It may be significant and worthy of further investigation that the stone creature proximate to the revealed shrine is a turtle. Turtles, of course, play an important role in the Chinese cosmology. Steles marking temples or shrines often stand on the backs of stone turtles. One of the alternative names of Mount Kunlun, residence of the Queen Mother of the West, was Tortoise Mountain (Guishan 龜山). According to the TPGJ 59.362, at the site where another Daoist divinity, the Brightstar Jade Girl (Mingxing yunü 明星玉女) rose to become an immortal, there was a giant stone turtle on the mountaintop—though it was not an animate creature.
Turtles are closely connected to longevity. Wu Zhao was fond of the turtle as an auspicious symbol. When she inaugurated the Zhou, she changed court adornments on ministerial garb from fish to turtles (JTS 6.121). Subjects also presented inscribed turtle shells at her court: Hu Yanqing presented a vermilion-painted turtle plastron that read “May the Son of Heaven live forever!” (ZZTJ 205.6484). When an auspicious stone turtle with the characters “Great Zhou” on top and the five elements and eight hexagrams on its sides was reportedly discovered at Hengshan, a site associated with Lady Wei, Li Qiao wrote a congratulatory memorial on behalf of pro-Buddhist minister Yao Shu (QTW 243.2457).
According to an entry titled “Natural Stones” (Ziran shi 自然石) in TPGJ 398.3193, “Scattered in the fields of Jianchang County in Hongzhou [Hu Chao’s home region], there were natural stone steles, stone men, and stone tortoises. No one knew how many there were. They all appeared to be carved and polished, but had no inscriptions.” Near to these naturally wrought stone figures was a deep, waterless stone well. Passages containing more stone figures led out from the well’s interior. This would seem to indicate that stone tortoises possessed a certain numinous air and were well known in Jiangnan lore.
53. Though Wu Zhao was officially Divine and Sagely Emperor of the Golden Wheel at the time the relics were discovered in 693, Yan Zhenqing used Celestial Empress, her title from 674–683, when Gaozong was still alive.
55. Kirkland, “Huang Ling-wei,” 52.
56. See Forte, Political Propaganda.
59. XTS 4.93; ZZTJ 205.6492.
60. TPGJ 288.2294; ZZTJ 206.6546.
61. In 1982 on Junji Peak, one of the highest peaks of Mount Song, a local found the inscribed “golden tally” that recorded the purpose of the Daoist ceremony. The inscription read:
The ruler of the Great Zhou Wu Zhao admires the true dao with its long-lived immortals and spirits. Therefore, we reverently go to the Central Marchmount Mount Song to cast the Golden Tally, praying to the Three Ministers and Nine Treasures of Nature, that they might expiate the sinful name of Wu Zhao. Kowtowing repeatedly and offering obeisance as he makes this humble petition, your subject Hu Chao fills this commission.
Translation from Rothschild, “Rhetoric, Ritual and Support Constituencies,” 232. Text and information about the golden tally are recorded in Su Jian, “Wu Zetian yu Shendu shiji” [Wu Zetian and Ruins in Divine Capital], in Su Jian and Bai Xianzhang, Wu Zetian yu Luoyang, 14. Kamitsuka Yoshiko (“Sokuten buko ki no Dokyo,” 249–51) also examines the golden tally and Hu Chao’s role in the “tossing the dragons” rite.
62. Cahill, Divine Traces, 120, 124 (translation of Yunji qiqian).
64. See, for instance, Wang Shuanghuai, “Lun Wu Zetian de gaige” [Discussing Change and Revolution Under Wu Zetian], in Wu Zetian yu Xianyang [Wu Zetian and Xianyang], ed. Zhao Wenrun and Xin Jialong (Xi’an: Sanqin, 2000), 117–18; and Hu Ji, Wu Zetian benzhuan, 85, who observes that “her appreciation of talent overrode her anger at being cursed and insulted.”
68. Benn, Cavern-Mystery Transmission, 10.
69. Despeux and Kohn, Women in Daoism, 6 and 14.