Empress Wu

A Kate Beaton comic that my advisor loved.

I'm just now reading Lin Yutang's Lady Wu (1958, 1965; I'm reading the 1965 edition and wondering if it is significantly revised from the version Levy reviewed in 1958). A quick search brought up a very nice statement of the main issue here by Howard S. Levy, reviewing Lin's work C. P. Fitzgerald's book from around the same time, The Empress Wu.

Authors Lin and Fitzgerald differ markedly in their conclusions about the Empress Wu, since they place their emphasis on different values. Dr. Lin's most important consideration in making his evaluation is moral character and ethical treatment of one's fellow man. Looking at the Empress Wu from this viewpoint, he is therefore justified in castigating her because of the cruel ways in which she liquidated her opponents and spared no one who stood in the way of her imperial ambitions, not even those in her immediate family. I believe that the case of Empress Wu must present something of a paradox to the orthodox Confucian, for here was a woman who flaunted the mores, was personally dissolute, and upset all normal family relations. And yet, despite these failings, she was able to regulate the Chinese nation with great ability. Dr. Fitzgerald approaches the question of Empress Wu more from a national standpoint. He is interested not in her personal foibles but in the fact that she ruled China effectively and in peace for a long period. He excuses her tyranny towards her associates, and prefers to analyze the ways in which she maintained a unified China and preserved it from disintegration at the hands of an incapable male sovereign. The reader, then, may consider Empress Wu either as a villaness who ruthlessly exterminated those closest to her in the upper strata of society, or as a gifted feminine monarch who saved the Tang dynasty from internal collapse and, in the words of Dr. Fitzgerald, was "among the greatest of heroic figures of history."