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With the Boys on the loose, her court was exuberant. Her festivals celebrated her own agelessness or triumph over age including her claim that her teeth were growing back, her eyebrows had realigned in an auspicious 8-shape – leading her in 699 to stage an ‘Anthem of the Sage’s Longevity’ with 900 dancers. Mortality is always a galling liability for any tyrant whose boundless power can only be curtailed by the terminal inconvenience of death. She gorged on Taoist elixirs, as her alchemists developed an ancient mix of heated saltpetre and sulphur – a stage in the long process that would lead to gunpowder.

When she was around eighty, Wu felt she had to consider the succession. She had advanced her own Wu family and renamed the Li princes Wu as well, but the Boys, fearing what would happen after Wu’s death, persuaded her to recall Li Zhe, the deposed emperor, as crown prince. But she was not softening. When the Boys snitched that her granddaughter and husband had criticized their antics, she had them beaten to death and the Boys raised to dukes. But their peculation was so brazen that ministers accused them of theft. She confronted the Boys before her court.

‘Your minister has accumulated merit in state service,’ insisted Zhang Changzong. ‘My offence should not result in dismissal.’

‘What meritorious service’, asked Wu, ‘has Changzong performed?’

‘Changzong’, replied the Boys’ most sycophantic courtier, ‘concocted a divine elixir and when Your Saintliness drank it, the draught proved most efficacious.’ This was surely the only court in history at which corruption was excused by the drinking of semen.

THE FLY KILLER OF DAMASCUS AND THE EMPRESSES OF TANG

Wu forgave Zhang. In late 704, she fell ill in the Longevity Basilica as her children feuded and opposition to the Zhangs whirled around the sickbed. Crown Prince Li Zhe and the Taiping Princess, realizing that the Boys were threatening the succession, recruited the guards. In February 705, Li Zhe and 500 guards broke into the Palace of Welcoming the Immortals, located the Zhang Boys and beheaded them on the spot. Then they burst into the empress’s bedroom, where they encircled her bed.

‘Who’s the cause of this ruckus?’ she demanded.

‘The brothers plotted rebellion,’ explained one of the accompanying ministers. ‘The crown prince ordered us to execute them.’

She spotted her anxious forty-eight-year-old son: ‘And you? Now the Boys have been executed, you may return to the Eastern Palace.’

Li Zhe was about to obey when a minister intervened: ‘We humbly desire Your Majesty transfer the throne to the crown prince.’

Casting a terrifying glance around the chamber, reminding the rebels of how she had promoted them, she sneered, ‘So this is your idea of payback is it?’

Three days later, as the five heads of the Boys were displayed near Heaven’s Ford Bridge, Li Zhe again became emperor, the Tang dynasty restored. On 16 December 705, Wu, honoured but under house arrest, seeming to have aged centuries without her cosmetics, died, buried in the same tomb as her husband.

Yet the age of female power was not over. The emperor’s wife, Wei, had survived Wu’s terror. ‘If we see the light of day again,’ her husband had promised, ‘I won’t stop you from doing anything.’ Wei took power, assisted by her lover Wu Sansi (Empress Wu’s nephew), who was also the lover of the old empress’s face-branded, formerly enslaved secretary Shangguan Wan’er, now in her forties. When this polyamorous foursome sat at a table in the Inner Court to play cards, the empress’s legs would become entangled with Wu Sansi’s under the table. So strong seemed feminine power that the empress persuaded her husband to declare their twenty-one-year-old daughter Princess Anle as crown princess. When the emperor resisted, Anle retorted, ‘If that Wu woman could become the emperor, why can’t the daughter of the emperor become an emperor?’

When the emperor tried to stop his wife’s abuses, Wei poisoned him with his favourite cakes, but she kept his death secret until she had appointed a teenage emperor whom she could dominate. The Taiping Princess now discovered that Wei planned to kill her, her brother (the ex-emperor) Li Dan and his sons. She had to act, recruiting her impressive nephew Li Longji, aged twenty-five, who one night in June 710 visited the Palace Gate, won over the guards and then, entering the palace, hacked down Empress Wei as she ran, stabbed Princess Anle as she put on make-up in the mirror and beheaded the great survivor, the tattooed Shangguan. Li Longji emerged from the showdown as Emperor Xuanzong. The Taiping Princess, very much Wu’s daughter, tried to poison him and launched a coup attempt which ended in the beheading of her sons and her own forced suicide.

Emperor Xuanzong, the soldier, calligrapher and poet who had cut down four powerful women to seize the crown, would deliver the apogee of Tang success – attaining power just as the Tang and the Arab empires came into contact for the first time.