Wu Zetian proclaims the Zhou dynasty, 690

Wu Zetian proclaims the Zhou dynasty

On 16 October 690 Wu Zhao, the empress dowager who had governed China for decades through her husband Gaozong and her sons, set aside the Tang, proclaimed the Zhou dynasty at Luoyang, which she called the Divine Capital, and three days later took the title of Holy and Divine Emperor. She reigned until 705, the only undisputed female sovereign in Chinese history.

Date

16 October 690exact dateDate in the Julian calendar

Place

Luoyang, the Divine Capitaltoday: Luoyang, Henan, China · East Asia

Participants

Wu Zetian, Tang dynasty

Threads

East Asia (6th–10th c.)

Also known as

Wu Zhou; Zhou dynasty (690–705); Second Zhou; Tianshou; Holy and Divine Emperor; Вторая Чжоу; Тяньшоу; 武周; 天授; 聖神皇帝

Wu Zhao had entered the palace as a concubine of Emperor Taizong. After his death she returned to court as a consort of his son Gaozong, became empress in 655, and from the 660s shared his power so openly that the court spoke of the ‘two sages’. When Gaozong died in 683 she ruled as empress dowager: in 684 she deposed her son Zhongzong after six weeks, kept his brother Ruizong on the throne as a figurehead, crushed a rebellion at Yangzhou led by Li Jingye and in 688 a rising of Tang princes, and encouraged informers and ruthless investigators to hunt down her opponents. She made Luoyang her capital, invented new written characters, among them the one for her own name, Zhao (曌), and in 689 adopted a calendar that began the year in the eleventh month, as the ancient Zhou was believed to have done.

In 690, according to the Old Book of Tang, ten monks presented a commentary on the Great Cloud Sutra that spoke of the empress as destined to rule, and a Great Cloud temple was ordered in every prefecture. On the ninth day of the ninth month — 16 October 690 — she ‘ended the mandate of the Tang’, named her dynasty Zhou and began the Tianshou era; three days later she took the title Holy and Divine Emperor and made Ruizong her ‘imperial heir’, and seven ancestral temples of the Wu family were founded in the Divine Capital.

As emperor she placed Buddhism above Daoism (691), widened recruitment through the examinations and fought the Tibetans and the revived Eastern Turks. In February 705, when she was over eighty, a palace coup killed her favourites and forced her to hand power back to Zhongzong; the Tang was restored, and she died that December. Confucian historians condemned her as a usurper; modern historians give more weight to her abilities and to the stability of her long rule.

Wu Zetian proclaims the Zhou dynasty

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