Heavenly Empress: The Age of Wu Zetian: A Novel of Tang and Wu Zhou China

The Empress Wu Zetian is a fascinating figure. I’ve thought so ever since I saw a segment of a video about her in a series on Imperial China. She was cunning and ruthless, and she was able to use both manipulation and sheer power to become not only the empress but the empress regnant, ruling over China in her own name until her death due to old age. I was sure that any novel about her would be truly fascinating.

Heavenly Empress was not quite the novel I was looking for. At times it didn’t seem like a novel at all but like a textbook. Each chapter has multiple endnotes to help explain various cultural and linguistic aspects, which might otherwise be lost on readers unfamiliar with the setting. They can be easy to overlook, however, which led to some confusion on my part as I read.

That wasn’t the only thing which made the book difficult to read. Characters were often brought in with little to no explanation of who they were, and little to make them memorable beyond a brief statement of their significance in the grander story. Because Wu Zetian’s life was so long and contained so much, there are a host of these characters, and it was difficult to tell which ones deserved to be remembered later on and which could be set aside when their time was done.

Even following Wu Zetian herself could be difficult at times. Zetian was not her given name for her whole life, and for much of the book she is referred to instead by the title Tianhou. Other names and nicknames are given to her so quickly that it can be difficult to remember which names are hers and which belong to another woman.

I also felt the book lacked focus. As I said before, a great deal happened during Wu Zetian’s reign. To cover all of it with enough depth and characterization to make it memorable would likely take more than the five hundred pages in this book. Xiong is ambitious enough to attempt it, though, and leaps from the Imperial Palace and the center of power to various uprisings. At times, the uprisings are given only short segments in each chapter, making it even more difficult to keep track of them.

Heavenly Empress takes on an ambitious project, but in the end, I think most readers would be better suited by turning to an actual textbook.