Shan Sa: Empress

Shan Sa's novel Empress (Impératrice in the original French) is a lyrical and panoramic imagining of the life of the only woman to ever rule in China as Empress Regnant, the Empress Wu Zetian. Born to a wool merchant and his second wife, the young Zetian was noticed for her intelligence and beauty at an early age and selected to be one of the Emperor's hundreds of concubines.

Starting from the limited record that remains about the Empress - much of it preserved (and hence somewhat suspect) by either her own enemies or enemies of the later Tang Dynasty emperors, whose ancestor she was - Shan Sa has crafted a detailed and largely sympathetic story of a brave and intelligent woman who rose to rule an empire in the power vacuum resulting from the advancing age and illness of one emperor and the diffidence of another.

Yet in producing a sympathetic portrait, author Shan Sa does not sweep the treachery and violence of the era under the carpet, not does she imagine Wu Zetian to be innocent of plots and bloodshed. Instead, she gives us a picture of an imperial court in which both the women of the imperial household and the officials of the imperial court, to say nothing of the children and other close relatives of the emperor and his wives and preferred concubines, constantly manoeuvre for position, power, and imperial favour, and are not above scheming, seducing, entrapping, murdering, or framing their rivals in order to gain advancement. In such an environment, much of the atrocity laid at Wu Zetian's feet can be seen as part of a struggle to survive, and the rest as invention aimed at tarnishing her reputation and memory.

As well, the fact that she did overthrow order by usurping the throne, which should have gone to her son at the death of the Emperor, and by being a woman who ruled as a man, would be more than enough to brand her as an unnatural creature. There is certainly more than a touch of misogyny in the way she has been vilified:

Explaining why the empress was so reviled, then, means acknowledging the double standard that existed–and still exists–when it comes to assessing male and female rulers. Wu probably did dispose of several members of her own family, and she ordered the deaths of a number of probably innocent ministers and bureaucrats. She also dealt ruthlessly with a succession of rivals, promoted members of her own family to high office, succumbed repeatedly to favoritism, and, in her old age, maintained what amounted to a harem of virile young men. None of these actions, though, would have attracted criticism had she been a man. Every Chinese emperor had concubines, and most had favorites; few came to power, or stayed there, without the use of violence. Taizong forced the abdication of his own father and disposed of two older brothers in hand-to-hand combat before seizing the throne. (http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/the-demonization-of-empress-wu-20743091/?no-ist)

One thing that history does seem to agree on is that she was an able and effective ruler who, by the standards of the time, tried to serve her people and improve the overall strength of the empire.

In Empress, Shan Sa brings this unprecedented female emperor to life and gives context and balance to the stories still told about her.