Shan Sa - Empress

Wisdom succeeded his brother in the title of Supreme Son and became actively involved with politics. In his Eastern Palace, he received intellectuals who acted as his scribes, and he started compiling books. My husband’s health was failing at the time, and I was informed that officials were secretly gathering in the heir’s household and criticizing my interference in affairs of State. It was not long before Wisdom gave his father a new version of The History of the Later Han Dynasty in which he rebuked regent empress mothers and referred to them as usurpers. I responded by writing two books intended for him: Advice to the Supreme Son and The Anthology of Sons Famous for Their Filial Devotion.

Wisdom cherished a particular adolescent whom he had had castrated. In the evenings, behind the closed doors of his palace, he organized feasts where he ran naked through the gardens with his guards and this emasculated favorite. When the noises from these orgies reached my husband over the walls of the Eastern Palace, he was furious and decided to punish the adolescent responsible for corrupting the king. The beautiful boy was snatched on a street corner and beaten by hired thugs, and he made some unexpected revelations: His master had had the Taoist Ming Chong Yan assassinated for refusing to poison me, and he was now planning a coup.

The Eastern Palace was searched, and the stables were found to be housing hundreds of weapons and breastplates, ready to equip a light cavalry. The coup was stopped just in time, and Wisdom was stripped of his title and banished from the Capital.

I discovered from his entourage that he knew I was not his true mother: Twenty years earlier, on the great pilgrimage, Elder Sister had delivered an illegitimate boy conceived with my husband. The very next day I had brought a stillborn child into the world. Ruby and Emerald were responsible for informing the sovereign and for swapping the infants. Claiming that she felt unwell, Mother left with the prince’s chill body wrapped in her coat and buried him in a monastery.

My son lay beneath a stela with no inscription. Wisdom, who was destined to be abandoned, could have taken his place on the throne. But the truth that we learn is more murderous than lies. Convinced that he was unloved, obsessed by imaginary hatred, he mistook my strict expectations and my severity for the deliberate oppression and gratuitous nastiness of a stepmother. In our eternal China, nothing comes closer to absolute power than the position of heir, and there is nothing more perilous than life spent so close to the flame. Some, like Wisdom, tried to force fate: The door was open, but it led only to downfall.

The Great General sent me a dispatch: Wisdom had hanged himself in his room. I had his body interred immediately, beneath a meager mound with no ornamentation, in an underground chamber with a few everyday objects. To appease evil minds who would have seen this as an assassination dressed up as suicide, I summoned the dignitaries to a lamentation ceremony. I wept tears of regret in public and granted a pardon to this rebellious son, restoring his crown as the King of Yong, the title he had borne as a youth.

My efforts to be joined to my children by a simple bond of happiness had proved fruitless. From the moment they were born, the distance between princes and an empress had only grown wider. I never breastfed my babies and had to disguise my jealousy as I watched them clutching avidly at other women’s breasts. As a young mother, I had been powerless to change the ancestral rules. My children were raised and instructed by high-ranking officials; they were taught to be afraid of me and to venerate me as a divinity. They grew up without learning so much as one poem from me. Whatever the circumstances, my thoughts and words for them took the form of orders transcribed onto silk by secretaries that they received on bended knee. At fifteen they were married and learned of physical pleasure. Their courts lay outside the Imperial City, and they opened their doors to ministers’ sons, guards, and their own ambitious cousins starting out on their careers. Their servants led them to believe that they were great men. Splendor decided to bide his time, and Wisdom wanted to make his mark. Miracle chose silence and Future rebellion.

At sixty, when women my age enjoyed the warmth of a happy home and played with their grandchildren, I felt more alone than ever. Little Phoenix had made his way to the heavens, and I to the abyss. Two of my sons now lay underground, and one was banished. Fearing that Wisdom’s supporters would get hold of his heirs and use their names to raise a rebel army, I had my grandsons repatriated into the Eastern Capital and shut away in a wing of the Forbidden City. Future’s family had gone with him into exile. Along the mountainous roads, his wife had brought a little girl into the world prematurely. With no midwife, Future himself had pulled her from her mother’s belly and hauled off his own tunic to swaddle her.

Gentleness stayed by my side, a young woman now, speechlessly contemplating my sorrow.

A FEW LETTERS sent by Wisdom had escaped the vigilance of the guards and had been propagated over the world. Seven months after his suicide, an insurrection erupted. Li Jing Yei, the grandson and heir of the Great General Li Ji, who had recommended me to the Forbidden City fifty years earlier, led a rebel army. He had been driven out of the Capital for corruption, and he and his supporters hoped to come back to Court as liberators. They succeeded by occupying the strategic town of Yang and gave command to a man who looked like Wisdom and claimed that the king was not dead, that they were acting on his orders. In the span of ten days, they gathered an army of one hundred thousand volunteers, a rabble of hooligans and bandits lured by the promise of incredible booty.

That morning I received the officials’ salutation in Luoyang. The pillars in the Palace of Virtuous Authority were like black dragons reaching up for the dark skies. Fires blazed along the rows, lighting the ministers’ anxious frightened faces. After the prostration and the prayer for long life, Pei Yan handed me the declaration that the rioters had distributed through districts that were now in their control.

Gentleness spread the scroll out on my table. The first verse seemed to jump off the page at me like a jet of venom: “The aforementioned regent Lady Wu is the issue of vile origins. In her youth she was summoned by the Emperor Eternal Ancestor, then she seduced Sovereign Father, debauched the Inner Palace, and bewitched the Supreme Son. She supplanted the Empress with her slander; her treacherous smile drove our master into an incestuous trap. Her heart is slyer than a lizard’s and crueler than a she-wolf’s. She is possessed by demons; she tortures loyal servants. She killed her sisters and assassinated her brothers. She hastened the sovereign’s death and poisoned her mother. Now that she has committed these murders, she no longer hides her usurpatory ambitions. She has imprisoned the heirs to the throne and entrusted affairs of State to members of her family. She is a cannibal, eating her way through the imperial lineage; she is evil, putting the dynasty in peril. Her crimes have provoked the wrath of men and of the gods. Her very existence sullies the purity of Heaven and Earth…”

In the second half of the manifesto, its author sang the praises of the rebel leader Li Jing Yei: “… Jing Yei, a former servant to the Imperial Court, the son of noble and glorious lords, has been denied power because he denounced corruption. Since then his indignation has grown more furious than a rainstorm, and he has sworn that he will free the throne from these vampires. Summoned by the disappointment of this world beneath the heavens and mandated by the Will of the People, he has raised the flag of revolt to cleanse away the scum of humanity. As far as the Land of One Hundred Tribes to the south and the limits of the Mountains of Rivers in the north, iron horsemen jostle to be first in line, wheels of jade rumble constantly onwards, everyone is marching on the enemy. Our grain stores are full of red sorghum from the four seas; our yellow banners advance inexorably as impetuous waves in a storm. The whinnying of our horses silences the North Wind itself, the gleaming blades of our swords outshine the celestial constellations. Our troops have only to whisper for entire hills and valleys to collapse; when our troops utter war cries, the clouds and the wind change color. With this strength, what enemy can resist us? With this strength, what city could withstand us?”