Empress (22 page)

Until her dying day, Mother had cherished and protected Intelligence. It was only after she was buried that I authorized judges to investigate this nephew I could no longer tolerate. His mother and his sister had been imperial favorites, and he himself bore the flamboyant title of Lord of the Kingdom of Zhou: Having power thrust upon him so easily had gone to his head. He was beautiful and captivating, which had given him a reputation as a womanizer. Instead of thinking of his career, he had concentrated on his countless amorous adventures. With a group of affluent young peers, he had squandered his inheritance in the pursuit of unknown pleasures. He had even gone so far as to seduce the girl betrothed to the Supreme Son while she was making an offering in a temple. For fear of being seen, they would meet in secret in an inn beside the serpentine river on the edge of a wood of apricot trees. Their love was discovered by chance; my husband was furious and banished the betrothed girl’s family. While he was in prison, Intelligence screamed that I had poisoned his sister and had had him arrested for fear of his vengeance. The jailors silenced his absurd pronouncements with a sound beating.

Winter had come. My disgraced nephew lost his title and his fortune and was banished from the Capital. I sent a faithful guardsman to give him some warm clothes in his camp on the Mountain of the Extreme. When the lieutenant returned, he presented me with a silk belt on a silver tray. He informed me that, overcome with shame and remorse, Intelligence had asked to be hanged from a tree.

I no longer had any relations from the outside in Court, and this absence weakened my position. My family had been built and dismantled to suit me. I had given every one of them wealth and position, but Elder Sister’s renunciation had been the first betrayal, which had invited others. Instead of following my rise, they had chosen to fall. My childhood was dead; there were no longer any faces around me to remind me of the distant landscape of innocence. Father and Mother had slipped away, and my sisters had followed them. I had to carry on, accompanied by my regrets.

I called my nephews from my father’s clan back from banishment to fill this void. I conferred the title of Father’s heir and head of the clan on Piety, the eldest. One family had been destroyed, and a new one would be built. With my brothers’ and cousins’ sons back in favor, I set up the village of Wu in Court. The younger generation understood that I had power over their success or their demise. They would show fear and adulation for me. I would help them weave a labyrinth of power that would allow me to govern with nothing to fear.

A great emptiness had been carved out in my soul; I watched all the effervescence of the world with a derisive smile. I still had the warmth of life within me, though, and enthusiasm for the future. There was still the Tang dynasty and its vast provinces. The millions of souls in the Empire had become a huge family in which I was the embodiment of an energetic and authoritarian mother. I was over forty, and I held in my hand an invisible sword that sliced through every illusion. The sharpness of the blade gave me its icy and dazzling strength. I no longer believed in the compassion of men; I believed in that of the gods. I had averted my eyes from my suffering and fixed them on the stars.

The Emperor Lordly Forebear had brandished his sword and conquered the Chinese lands with arms. When the Emperor Eternal Ancestor had risen to the throne, he had healed the wounds of a ravaged country. Thirty years after it was founded, our Tang dynasty had all the fragile grandeur of a convalescing empire. In our hands it would see unprecedented prosperity or fall back into poverty. It would be a unified power or would splinter into kingdoms.

Our august predecessor had been chiefly preoccupied with agrarian developments, and, like him, we continued to lower land taxes. Weaving factories proliferated along the banks of both great rivers. To encourage households all over China, I set an example by rearing silk worms in the imperial parks. While the sovereign personally took part in more and more ritual ceremonies for the cultivation of the land, I conducted the meticulous celebrations for harvesting mulberry leaves so that the Goddess of Weavers would give us her blessing.

Caravans came from the west in search of porcelain and silk, breathing new life into our civilization. Our women, tired of being swaddled in several layers of dresses with long sleeves, now chose tunics with narrow sleeves, wide trousers, and leather boots that freed their feet from the constraints of rigid shoes with curled toes. The dizzying height of our traditional headdresses required hours of work, and they were so heavy that they impaired our movements. The desert women wore their hair simply dressed, crowned with light felt hats; by imitating them, we could walk or run as fast as men.

The craze for exotic spices and foreign foods kept expanding. Furniture from western kingdoms streamed into China, piled on camels’ backs. High-level chairs and tables and raised beds allowed us to stretch our legs and brought beneficial comforts to our everyday lives. Our ancestral arts favored restraint, purity, and metaphysical abstraction, but this quest for a spiritual essence denied the warmth of the senses and the whims of the heart. The music from the oasis conquered us with its powerful impulsive rhythms and immodest palpitations. The twirling dances from those parts-so different from the Chinese dances that included restricted and graceful slowness and ritual gestures-showed us all the beauty of spontaneity and reconciled for us the sensuous pleasures that our sages had neglected for so long.

Imperial patrols guaranteed the safety of the Silk Road through the Gobi desert. Inside the Great Wall, new inns had been built to make the journey easier for travelers. In Long Peace I opened academies to provide a forum for foreign scholars and Chinese tutors to pass on their knowledge, train interpreters, and compile dictionaries in every language.

Officials complained about the growing number of temples dedicated to unknown idols, but I ignored these pointless concerns. Buddha was a god who had been revealed to the West, and the spread of the Buddhist faith had never eclipsed the glory of the deities we had venerated since the dawn of time. Every religion was a blade that allowed its faithful to carve up the lie that is life. I encouraged my people to choose the tool that suited them best.

In my eyes, a country’s enthusiasm for other customs was the mark of a great civilization that could absorb every difference. This new wealth and the abundance of our own ancient heritage had transformed China into a stellar empire that shone beyond its own borders. Distant kingdoms dreamed of Long Peace as a city destined to be happy and prosperous. Our history, which had been related through the dynasties by Court chroniclers, was a generous source from which men could draw ideas and reflections. Our criteria for elegance became the universal points of reference for good taste. Western kings and far-eastern princes sent their scholars to our Court to study politics, justice, administration, military organization, medicine, literature, the arts, and architecture. Numerous foreign capitals took their inspiration from the example set by Long Peace, and their imperial palaces were smaller copies of ours. Chinese was the most widespread language in the world, and it became the official language of diplomacy with which every kingdom could communicate. The morals and ethics of Confucius were adopted by many countries and served as a code of behavior and an official doctrine.

Inside the Great Wall, I encouraged trade between the towns of the Yellow River and the River Long. I constantly created new routes to stimulate exchanges between different regions. Nevertheless, the rivers remained my own preferred means of transport. Forty years later, I still could not forget the huge sailing boats laden with mountains of goods. Every year I opened a new canal to provide irrigation for the fields and a link between the rivers.

Long Peace, the greatest trading town under heaven, prospered. Luoyang, Yangzhou, and Jinzhou became commercial crossroads where commoner clans accrued new fortunes. Since the dawn of time, merchants had occupied the lowest rung on the social ladder. Previous Courts had treated them as thieves, but I recognized their active participation in the country’s prosperity: Their greed spurred on an increase in expertise and furthered productivity among farmers and craftsmen; their speculations guaranteed closer links between the north and the south and the towns and the country. Their dynamic outlook contrasted with the weighty aristocracy with their Great Names and their autocratic way of life that was now hampering the Empire’s development.

These old families were major landowners and had reached their peak during the Wei and Jin dynasties. Within their fortified farms, which were like completely independent kingdoms, they intermarried and defied central authority by refusing any interference from the outside world. When our Tang dynasty was founded and the Emperor Lordly Forebear distributed noble titles to his comrades in arms, this gesture was frowned on. When the Emperor Eternal Ancestor published his
Book of Clans
in which he put the imperial family before the Great Names, he too was jeered at. As the daughter of an ennobled merchant, I would never forget how the old aristocracy had treated me with contempt. More than any previous sovereign, I wanted to dismantle an outdated world and its obsolete hierarchy.

An imperial decree forbade a dozen of the key families from arranging marriages with one another. Two ministers who had been born commoners were given the responsibility of establishing a new social order. They wrote the
Book of Names,
which was accepted as an authority so that the new titles given out by the sovereign came before the old nobility.

Ever since ancient times, the Court had recruited its highest officials from the Empire’s aristocratic clans, and their duties had been handed down from father to son. Politics was a matter of inheritance, something that was constantly redistributed among the privileged. Matrimonial alliances reinforced the influence of ambitious households that held sway over sovereigns. Emperor Yang of the previous dynasty had invented a system of recruitment by public competition that allowed scholars to earn state responsibilities and the title of mandarin. But until now this method of selection had been restricted to the appointment of minor officials whose careers would always be limited because of their origins.

Now our empire was evolving: Demographic growth and increasing wealth in the towns meant we needed an efficient administrative system and well-supported imperial authority. Finely dressed noblemen who could quote the Classics and hold metaphysical conversations were living in a world far removed from reality. How could they give judicious advice to a sovereign who would never set foot outside the Forbidden City?

My reform received Little Phoenix’s approval; he had a taste for overturning customs. A decree was published ordering the ministers and provincial governors to recommend capable men to the Court, regardless to their origins. Soon the sovereign followed my advice and encouraged widespread competition for the mandarinate by honoring the final exam with his sacred presence.

Sitting behind the throne, surrounded by curtains of mauve gauze, I watched the scholars in contention for the title. They knelt before their writing desks where the paper, quills, and ink had been prepared for them by eunuchs; some shook with fear, and others struggled to keep their calm. I remembered my own anguish and feverish excitement when I was presented to the Eternal Ancestor for the first time. Unlike the previous sovereign who had not known how to choose among his ten thousand beauties, I vowed to myself never to ignore any man who might some day become a pillar of the Empire.

The Court finally opened its doors wide. A son of a Great Name would consider his nomination to be rightfully his whereas an ennobled Minor Name would show gratitude to his benefactor. The number of commoner-born ministers increased as the sovereign’s authority grew. Life was no longer fated. Education offered those of lowly birth an opportunity to rise. Now, through competition, thousands could aspire to a better lot.

THE STARS HAD foretold glory.

For four consecutive years, the sun, rain, and snow lavished Chinese soil with their generosity. From the heart of the imperial city to the four horizons, the old society perished, and a new world was born. Fields impregnated with the sweat of toiling peasants undulated voluptuously beneath the sky. Silks and brocades slithered off the looms, each a loving whisper from its weaver. Outlying lands became populated, and smoke from kitchen fires spiraled up into the sky in every direction. Every five lis another cockerel crowed, and another flock of sheep bleated. New barns were raised in the provinces to store the exceptional harvests; bolts of silk accumulated in the imperial storehouses. The price of rice fell to five sapeks per bushel.

Emperor Yang of the overthrown dynasty had had ostentatious tastes: His court and his dignitaries, following his example, had been carried away in a whirlwind of spending on pointless pleasures. Art and poetry in his time had predicted decline: Poets, calligraphers, and painters had been prisoners of a world full of refined form but devoid of content. Their affected sentiments and vapid pomposity betrayed their impotence. Under my husband’s reign, our Tang dynasty shook off this decadent style. A person’s energy was now more important than their aesthetic learning, and appearances reflected inner depths and breadth of spirit. By wearing dresses that were worn and darned, I imposed a more sober fashion on the Court, and by using calligraphy stripped of any superfluous frills, I communicated my preference for the essential to Court officials. I myself read the papers written by the candidates in imperial competitions, and I selected those whose writing impressed me. The mannerist poets disappeared from Court: Their superficial moaning was replaced by powerful verses with simple rhythms full of vibrant emotion.

Our empire was an earthly oasis, a grain-store for the heavens, and it became the envy of the many nomadic tribes whose constant travels were dictated by pasture and water sources. Since the dawn of time, the Chinese people had been living with this fear: stampeding archers appearing out of the desert and closing in on our villages, throwing our harvests and our women onto their horses’ backs, and leaving our fields devastated and our houses burned to the ground.