Wu Zetian

Wu Zhao was born in 624 to a wealthy Shanxi timber merchant and was unusually taught to read the classics. At fourteen she entered Taizong's harem as a low-ranking concubine. After his death in 649 she was sent to a convent, but his heir Gaozong recalled her. In 655, after a brutal palace conflict, she became empress consort over the objections of Taizong's veterans — the start of a long power transfer to Wu herself.

From 660 Gaozong suffered strokes and Wu took over daily petitions. After his death in 683 she deposed her sons Zhongzong and Ruizong and ruled as empress dowager. In 690 she founded the Zhou dynasty and crowned herself huangdi as Sacred and Divine Sovereign, circulating the Great Cloud Sutra to legitimise a female ruler as Maitreya reborn.

Her reforms were transformative. She standardised anonymous grading of examination papers — a precedent for blind review that became universal under later dynasties — and recruited from outside the great clans. Di Renjie, Yao Chong and Song Jing, architects of Xuanzong's High Tang, all entered government under her patronage.

The other face was institutionalised terror. Wu installed bronze boxes for anonymous denunciation and empowered jurists such as Lai Junchen, whose methods were collected in The Classic of Entrapment. Her victims included Tang princes and her own sons: Li Hong died suspiciously in 675, Li Xian was forced to suicide. She elevated Wu kinsmen to senior posts.

Frontier policy was mixed: her commanders destroyed Goguryeo in 668, but the Khitan rebellion of 696 cost heavy losses. In her final years she depended on the Zhang brothers. In February 705 chancellor Zhang Jianzhi led a palace coup and forced Wu to abdicate. She died at eighty-two, asking to be buried as empress, not emperor, beside Gaozong at Qianling. Modern reassessment is more even-handed than the Confucian condemnation that preceded it: her reforms set up Xuanzong's golden age, while her terror prefigured later authoritarianism.