In Chinese history heroes are always surrounded by myths, or at least by stories that may well be myths. True or false, they nonetheless reveal something of the subject’s character. The all conquering T’ai Tsung , the real founder of the T’ang Dynasty shown below in a larger than life portrait done a few centuries after his death in 649:
The Great Ancestor. The emperor’s domestic happiness was marred when his empress died and their son the crown prince turned against him. He tried to murder his father, and for this, he was banished into exile,where he soon died. His younger brother, Li Chih, became crown prince in his stead, but could be characterized as a person of physical and moral weakness. Nice guys finish last as they say. Especially in seventh-century China where pacification and conquest ruled the roost. The widower, however sorrowing he may have felt, did not give up women, even though he was not like his father, whose harem of over three thousand girls and servants had to be sent home after his abdication. In 638, hearing of a pretty Shansi girl named Wu Chao, Shih-min casually sent for her and added her to his collection. This thirteen year old was to make her mark on Chinese history.
On his death in 649 he became T’ai Tsung, the Grand Ancestor. Miss Wu, moved from fifth grade concubine in the harem hierarchy, which was pretty decent. Only light housekeeping duties, and she ended up seducing Tsung’s son. That was disrupted on Tsung’s death where she had to shave her head and enter a convent to spend the rest of her life as a Buddhist nun. She was brought back by popular demand as they say, to counter the effect of the new emperor’s wife’s rival, The Pure Concubine, and in dozens of subtle ways she undermined the Empress Wang and the Pure Concubine, ending by locking both in a dungeon and she became Kao Tsung’s consort and empress. And yes, Wu Chao had the dungeon dwellers beaten, tortured and killed. …