Princesses Behaving Badly (8 page)

Wu and Gaozong appeared to have ruled “jointly,” although some historians claim she was the real power. By 660 she was a fixture in the throne room, observing all of her husband’s audiences and offering advice and pronouncements from behind a screen. After Gaozong suffered a series of strokes that left him half blind and unable to walk or speak, Wu assumed his official duties, and the screen was taken down.

Upon Gaozong’s death in 683, Wu became empress dowager, a title that usually indicates it’s time to leave the stage. But Wu’s final act was yet to come. With her son nominally on the throne (after, it should be noted,
the deaths of his two older brothers, at least one of which was indirectly ascribed to Wu), Wu now held the real power. And when this son proved to be less malleable than she’d hoped, she had him exiled to a distant province and replaced with another son. (Not for nothing did she also have the Chinese word
prince
changed to be made up of the characters meaning “one who keeps a peaceful mouth.”)

Four years after Gaozong’s death, Wu was done trying to rule through her sons. After a carefully cultivated campaign of prophecy, public relations, and propaganda, she declared herself “Sage Mother, Holy Sovereign,” giving herself extraordinary power. But even that wasn’t enough. Three years later, in 690, she shrugged off the “Sage Mother” mantle and declared herself emperor.

Wu ruled through a combination of public relations shrewdness and secret-police terror. By declaring herself emperor, she effectively ended the Tang dynasty and started her own, the Zhou, angering the remaining imperial family members. To silence her critics, she had them all exiled or executed. She had always relied heavily on informants, creating an atmosphere of distrust and fear. She’d had copper “suggestion boxes” posted in cities, allowing people to anonymously report information on rivals, and invited anyone with useful information to travel to the palace on her dime. The fruits of that information could be deadly; between 684 and 693, Wu went through 46 chief ministers, half of whom were murdered or committed suicide. After outliving his usefulness, her supposed lover, the Rasputin-like leader of a Buddhist cult, was beaten to death on her command. Even her own relatives lived in mortal fear they’d become “inconvenient.”

According to Chinese chroniclers in later centuries, Wu was also free with her sexual favors, supposedly forming her own male harem at the advanced age of 66. She reportedly entertained a string of inappropriate lovers, including a well-endowed peddler, a pair of smooth-cheeked singing brothers, and her own nephew. (Take all that with a big grain of salt, though—the easiest way to slander a woman in any era is to call her a slut.)

But Wu also ruled effectively, benignly, and even wisely over a nation of 50 million. Her subjects didn’t see Emperor Wu as a dangerous monster or a tyrant; she united the kingdom at a time when it appeared to be disintegrating.
Not only did she manage to keep the empire together and end the predations of the Tartars, who were ripping apart the northern border, she also expanded its territory, doing so with remarkably few wars.

Under Wu, as both empress and emperor, taxes decreased, financial waste and military expenditure were reduced, retirees got pensions, and salaries of deserving officials rose. She introduced the system of entrance examinations for bureaucratic service, a huge step toward meritocracy and away from nepotism. She passed legislation allowing children to mourn the death of
both
parents, not just the father, as had been custom and law. Under her rule, Chinese generals helped Korea oust their Japanese overlords and unite under a new king. The Japanese were so impressed that they started copying everything the Tang did, right down to building their capital city in imitation of China’s capital.

Wu ruled for 15 years as emperor before anyone got up the nerve and resources to challenge her. In 705, a faction of Tang loyalists, headed by Wu’s exiled son, suggested that it was time for her to abdicate the throne. When Wu didn’t take the hint, her pair of singing lovers was found murdered, their bodies placed in her rooms. When she still didn’t take the hint, a knife was held to her throat and she was forced to “retire.”

Wu died later that year—of natural causes, surprisingly—after ruling ably and peacefully for the better part of 50 years. She had used the same tools as emperors had for many a generation before her: execution, banishment, terror. But such behavior has been deemed unbecoming of a woman, and Wu has gotten short shrift.

How later rulers felt about Wu is clear by how they chose to remember—or in this case
not
remember—her. Chinese tradition at the time dictated that rulers be buried in sumptuous tombs marked with huge memorial tablets. Usually, the tablets were covered with details of all the great and glorious deeds the ruler had done and how he would be missed. Not so with Wu. Her tablet remained blank, a mute testament to women who accomplished much, but about whom no one had a good word to say.

Empress Wu Zetian wasn’t the only crafty woman in imperial China. In 684, Wu had her son Li Xian kicked off the throne and exiled to a remote outpost. He brought along his wife, Princess Wei, and lucky for him he did: if it weren’t for Wei’s constant goading and admonitions, Li Xian probably would have committed suicide while in exile.

It likely wasn’t out of love for her husband that Wei talked him down—she simply was not about to let the chance to become empress pass by twice. When, in 705, the opportunity finally came again, she seized it. A group of Tang family loyalists took Li Xian as their leader and deposed Emperor Wu; Li Xian became Emperor Zhongzong, and he and his wife, Empress Wei, made their way back to the palace.

Now sitting pretty on the throne, Empress Wei had an affair with Wu’s nephew Sansi, who was having an affair with the emperor’s old private secretary. This wicked threesome made a fortune selling official posts, but the power still wasn’t enough. Wei and Sansi, who by that time had been elevated to a high ministerial post, proposed that the imperial daughter, Princess Anle, be named heir apparent. Not so fast, cried the legitimate crown prince, Li Chongjun, who marched on the palace but was repelled after his own troops turned on their commanders.

Despite the setback, Wei and Anle weren’t cowed. Three years later, they finally pulled off their own coup, killing Emperor Zhongzong with a poisoned cake and installing a more malleable son, Li Chongmao, on the throne. Inspired by Wu, they planned to rule through him while preparing to install Anle on the throne as China’s second female emperor. Unfortunately for them, Wu Zetian’s daughter Princess Taiping got
wind of the plan first and went to battle on behalf of her brother Ruizong. Anle’s head was lopped off while she was putting on eye makeup.

But as usual, things weren’t exactly what they seemed. Ruizong knew full well that his sister, Princess Taiping, was only biding her time until she could make her own attempt to steal the crown. So he got crafty. First, he named his son Xuanzong to be his successor and abdicated the throne; then he had Xuanzong move on Taiping, based on the claim that she was about to try to depose him. After several of her men were killed, Taiping fled to a Buddhist monastery, where she was “allowed” to kill herself.

The real surprise is that the Tang dynasty would continue for another 200 years, shocking given its members’ murderous (and suicidal) tendencies to kill themselves and each other.

Njinga of Ndongo

C
A
. 1581–D
ECEMBER
17, 1663
S
OUTHWESTERN
A
FRICA
(
PRESENT
-
DAY
A
NGOLA
)

T
he year was 1621. Princess Njinga was charged by her half brother Mbandi, ruler of the West African kingdom of Ndongo, to meet with Portuguese officials. For decades, the two powers had been fighting an on-and-off war, with the Europeans trying to seize more territory and resources. Now a treaty seemed possible. But when Njinga met with the Portuguese governor, she was faced with a blatant power play intended to humiliate her. While the governor lounged comfortably like
a king on a throne, Njinga was not even offered a chair.

The princess was having none of this nonsense. At her gesture, one of her maidservants got down on hands and knees. Njinga then sat on the woman’s back and addressed the governor as an equal. The negotiations were successful, and the peace treaty was signed. And just a few years later, Njinga would be sitting on a throne of her own—and it wouldn’t be made of maidservants.

Njinga was the eldest daughter of the ruler of the Ndongo kingdom, a loose federation of Mbundu-speaking tribes in what is now the Central African state of Angola. At the time of her birth, the country was roughly 100 years into a complicated relationship with the Portuguese; the colonizers had arrived in the area in 1483 and been working hard to enslave or convert the population ever since.

This situation didn’t exactly sit well with the people of Ndongo, though not entirely for the reasons you might think. A slave trade already existed between Ndongo and Kongo, its neighbor to the north, largely in war captives; by the 1500s, the two countries shared this trade with the Portuguese. But the Europeans were always angling for a bigger piece of the pie. The Ndongo nation fought several wars with Portuguese forces over independence and control of the slave trade and profitable salt and silver mines. Of course, that didn’t mean that Africans and Europeans were always at odds. If, say, the king of Kongo was getting a little grabby in their territory, Ndongo rulers called on the Portuguese as allies.

But in 1575, the Portuguese upped the tension by establishing a colony at the city of Luanda, located between the two kingdoms’ territories, and started to stir up dissension among some of the disaffected factions nominally under Ndongo rule. Njinga’s father, Ngola Kilajua (
ngola
means “king”; the word was later taken by the Portuguese as the name of Angola), went to war against them, kicking off a protracted and bloody dispute.

Princess Njinga was born into this uncertain landscape of shifting alliances and near-constant conflict. Stories about her childhood read like something out of
Girls’ Own Adventure
. She was a tomboy who could hold
a spear like a warrior and preferred climbing trees to doing more traditional girl things. She also didn’t take any crap—she once beat her half brother Mbandi bloody after he stole her beaded necklace, humiliating him in front of the entire village.

The mythos about Njinga tells us that she grew into a strong, proud, decisive princess, the kind who was born to rule. But when her father died in 1617, her gender precluded her from ascending to the throne. It was Mbandi who became king, but only after murdering another brother as well as Njinga’s infant son. As you might imagine, Mbandi was neither a benevolent nor a sensible ruler. One story claims that when Njinga spoke out against his plans to pit his spear-armed warriors in open battle against the cannon-armed Portuguese, he had her forcibly sterilized. The Portuguese also knew his faults and pressed their advantage, sending missionaries and soldiers farther into Ndongo territory.

So in 1621, Princess Njinga was sent by her cowardly, villainous sibling to meet with the Portuguese governor and negotiate the end of hostilities. Njinga forced the governor to meet her eye to eye, both figuratively and literally. The treaty was signed, the Portuguese recognized the sovereignty of the Mbundu-speaking people, and all it cost was the return of a few European captives.

Three years later, Mbandi was dead and Njinga took the throne with the backing of a grateful people. She reengaged the Portuguese after they broke the peace treaty (surprise!) and relocated her subjects to a more defensible location in the highlands. From there, Njinga directed a guerilla war that left the invaders demoralized and weakened, holding them off for four decades. After her death, the kingdom disintegrated. Yet, even as Ndongo became Angola under Portuguese rule, her people still remembered her. In 1860, a Scottish missionary recorded meeting an Angolan man who told him, “In Angola, every living, breathing thing, down to the last blade of grass in your path, still remembers our great queen.”

So now you’ve heard the lore. The reality is messier … and bloodier. Rather than deferring to her brother until her country needed her, Njinga
had in fact been looking for a path to the throne since her father’s death. Because Ndongo precedent disallowed women rulers, she publicly supported Mbandi while busily amassing supporters and justifications for her own claim to the throne.