The only woman in Chinese history to rule as emperor in her own name — she rose from a Tang court concubine to supreme power, founded the Zhou dynasty, wielded the civil-service examination system as a tool of political restructuring, used Buddhism to legitimate her reign, and received from the historians who followed her a portrait so hostile that separating the record from the slander remains an active scholarly problem.
In 690 CE, a woman in her sixties declared herself emperor of China, took the title Sacred and Divine Emperor, and ruled for fifteen years. She had entered the Tang court at fourteen as a low-ranking concubine. She outlasted two emperors, governed in her own name for two decades before the formal proclamation, and died peacefully at eighty in the palace where she had wielded power for half a century. No other woman in Chinese history achieved this. The historians who recorded her reign spent the next thousand years explaining why she was a monster.