Luoyang, China, the year 655. Two women sat in wine jars in a palace cellar, their hands and feet

freshly severed, their bodies whipped raw, the stumps still weeping into the dregs. The woman

who put them there, stood above them,

and watched. She was 31 years old, newly crowned Empress of China, and she wanted to make sure

they understood. The jars were not punishment. They were a message, and the message was not for the two

women drowning in rice wine and their own blood, it was for

everyone else. Wu Zetian did not claw her way from concubine to the dragon throne by being

understood. She got there by being feared, and the fear started here, in this cellar with

Empress Wang and consort Xiao, the two women who had stood between her and

absolute power, dying by inches in ceramic tombs, while the new empress watched with the patience

of a woman who had waited a very long time for this. She had entered the imperial court at

14. Her father, Wu Shiwei, was a timber merchant

from Wen Shui County in Shanxi province, who had backed the right horse during the rebellion that

toppled the Sui dynasty. That bet bought his daughter a place in Emperor Taizong's palace in

638, a low-ranking concubine, fifth tier, one of dozens. Most girls in that position

spent their years in silk and silence, furniture with a pulse. Wu spent hers reading state documents.

Taizong recognized something in the girl that had nothing to do with beauty. He made her his

personal secretary. She sat in rooms where wars were planned and rivals

were destroyed, and she learned the machinery of empire the way a watchmaker's daughter learns gears,

by proximity, by attention, by keeping her mouth shut and her eyes open. Taizong died in 649. Court

protocol required his concubines to shave their heads and enter

Ganya Temple as Buddhist nuns. Wu went. She was 25, exiled to a convent. Her career as

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