Daughter of Heaven
by Nigel Cawthorne
The historical biography of Empress Wu Chao, who rose to power towards the beginning of the Tang dynasty and left a legacy for women and Emperors after her. The story of her life is something worth admiring - sure, she was pretty ruthless, and had a tendency to kill off her own relatives and/or lovers, and liked to build uselessly large temples venerating her as a goddess, but she also became a ruling regeant in an age when any political power was off-limits for women, made a lot of nice changes to the civil service examination systems and such, and paved the way for her succeeding Emperors to bring the Tang dynasty to its glory days. The last chapter or two of the book is dedicated to exploring what happened after Wu Chao died, and it gives a good idea of the kind of legacy she left her successors. Women in the palace, one after another, entered the court and bid for power in the same fashion as Wu Chao had done, and the idea that women were helpless little kitchen maids took a backseat in the decades following Wu Chao's abdication and death. This is amazing, considering the Confucious ideas that dominated Chinese historical thought. Plus the number of coup de tats was astounding - Wu Chao really shook things up in court before she left it for good.
Cawthorne has done an amazing amount of research into Wu Chao's history, and draws from a variety of sources in order to bring out the most complete picture of what was going on at the time. He often brings in extraneous information about the culture of palace life, or records of small episodes that don't hold much weight in the grand scheme of politics, just to provide a more comprehensive look at what life was like in the Chinese palace at the time. Some of it feels useless, but others definitely add an interesting perspective. For instance, when describing Wu Chao's early entrance into the palace as a concubine, Cawthorne spends an almost obnoxiously long amount of pages giving details about sex life in the palace - this feels pretty useless considering the book is more about Wu Chao's political contributions and intrigues. However, later on Cawthorne narrates small vignettes that occurred between ministers and Wu Chao (e.g. a minister speaks out bravely against Wu Chao's promiscuous private life, and contrary to everyone's expectations that the queen would shout "OFF WITH HIS HEAD!!" she bestows a reward on him for his honesty) to flesh out the figures that inhabited her palace.
The narrative voice tends to get a bit dull and repetitive - Cawthorne is more of a historian than a writer. He does a fairly good job of giving an objective, foreigner's look at this highly charged historic and political figure, and leaves it up to the reader to judge Wu Chao based on her promiscuous love affairs, her violent rise to power, or her helpful reforms that did much to improve China's socio-economic situation. However, he tends to use the same adjectives and narrative phrasing one too many times and often uses plainly awkward sentence structures. There are also some grammar mistakes - not frequent, but enough to get annoying after a while. This is probably more the fault of the editor than the author himself, but it still shows a lack of attention (or a lack of grammatical skill) to the work as a published document.
Be prepared to memorize names. Lots of them. Foreign, Chinese names that have been desperately romanized and cannot be pronounced in any form of English without some tongue-twisting. The author was kind enough to include a "Dramatis Personae" at the end of the book cataloging the names of everyone who appears, but who wants to be going back and forth looking up names at every sentence? I just chugged through it. It sometimes makes it easier because most of the characters end up dying within a few pages of being introduced.
Overall a nice introduction to some Chinese history. It was a pretty basic volume of information, but I liked that it was very elementary level reading because I had to be reading a lot of more advanced, difficult books at the same time for school.
