Brute Beasts

For Wu, the young prince may have been the only adult male she had encountered since she entered the palace, a welcome change to the sickly, ailing man whose bedpan she was obliged to empty. Despite rulings against adult men in the inner palace, Gaozong had trampled on tradition in order to make a public display of his affection for his father. Most importantly of all, Wu was a wilful, ambitious girl, not afraid to boast of extreme measures, prepared to suggest that it was better to kill a rebellious horse than let it fight on. She was the epitome of all-or-nothing, one of the most beautiful women in the world, and soon to be facing decade after decade of monastic seclusion, unless she took drastic steps.

Folklore recounts that Gaozong got up at one point to relieve himself, coming back out of the water closet to find that Wu had followed him in to the antechamber. She knelt on the floor before him and offered a water bowl for him to wash his hands. As he did so, he inadvertently splashed her face with water and commented that the 'clear waters have marred your powder'.

Wu flirtily replied: 'I accept Heaven's favour of rain and mist,' making a poetic allusion to sexual intercourse. A later, and considerably less reliable source has Gaozong initiating the wordplay, flicking water at her from the bowl, and musing aloud that he has been thinking of an old story in which a prince has sex with a goddess. Wu then replies with a couplet of her own, in which she suggests the pair of them sneak behind the curtains to make love.

Laws dictated that a son having sex with one of his father's wives, even one who may never have consummated her 'marriage', was an act of incest. Such a situation was expressly mentioned in one of the ancient Confucian books of protocol, which stated: 'Brute beasts are without propriety; therefore father and son share the same hind.' Such Freudian tensions would have been all the more disruptive at the time as they would have brought back memories of a similar scandal in 604, when Emperor Taizong's cousin infamously celebrated his accession by having sex with two of his late father's concubines. Since the Tang dynasty was at least partly founded on the idea of not making the same mistakes as its predecessor, Prince Gaozong's behaviour was dangerously provocative.

Whatever the exact circumstances, it is widely accepted that Wu and Gaozong were intimate before her 'husband' Taizong was dead. No mention is made of it in the Tang annals of the time, although it was certainly a matter of scurrilous gossip during Wu's own time, and would later be levelled against her as an accusation by one of her rivals. At the time, however, it seems that only Wu and her lover were aware of the incident.

Fictional accounts of Wu's life have her cuddling up to Gaozong in the afterglow, sobbing that she was torn between her loyalty to the dying Emperor and to the passions of his son, and that in having sex with Gaozong she has become a sinner and a criminal. Gaozong supposedly unhooked his belt and gave it to her as a keepsake, promising that when he became emperor, Wu would become empress. This part of the story rather ignores the fact that Gaozong already had a wife of his own.

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Excerpt 2: Treacherous Fox
Excerpt 3: The Cruel Clerks