It goes without saying that Wu Zetian, probably until the modern era and to an extent even now, acquired a reputation among historians for being tyrannical and cruel. In traditional Chinese sources, the gruesome details of the accusations levelled against her read as rather...fantastical. Not that this is at all out of the ordinary for Chinese histories, which seem very character and narrative-driven and cast every other monarch to rule this or that dynasty as a complete psychopath who would make even the most conspicuously hostile portrayals of Nero or Caligula blush, but the fact that Wu was a woman, and therefore doubly at odds with Confucian tradition, further problematises the accuracy of accounts of her reign.

Passing over the stuff that is obvious character assassination, and the neat narrative flourishes that could be true but are entirely without substantial evidence and which are almost certainly impossible to prove (the whole infanticide thing for example), how much do we actually know about the way Wu Zetian reigned?

If even half of what the traditional accounts say are true, she would make Stalin raise an eyebrow. The stories of constant purges, mass proscriptions and executions, an extensive secret police employing Orwellian methods, widespread denunciations and the like that are supposed to have characterised Wu's murderous rampage across the Tang Empire sound more like something from a 20th century totalitarian regime than pre modern China. If anything, the logistics of it just seem implausible.

Does much in the way of contemporary written records survive from Wu's reign to corroborate this picture of her rule? Surely the structure of pre-modern Chinese society would have made such ruthless despotism practically impossible, and nobody could rule a vast territory through fear alone at a time when empires were comprised in large part of power bases of regional lords and clans and such. Had Wu truly been so sweeping and ruthless in culling the Chinese elite, how would she have managed to rule (de facto and de jure) as long as she did, able to dispatch rebellion rather easily for someone who is characterised as the irredeemable ruler from hell?