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This annotated translation of Zhang Zhuo’s collection of miscellany, Court and Country, offers a lively, folksy, and novel perspective on the empire of Wu Zhao, China’s first and only female emperor, that will amuse and shock readers, prompting them to recalibrate everything they think they know about medieval China. The World of Wu Zhao includes separate chapters on a number of different themes and topics: Buddhist and Daoist monks, the female emperor’s male favorites (who dressed up in rainbow feathered garments and pranced around her court astride wooden red-capped cranes), cruel officials (bloodthirsty henchmen who took an aesthetic delight in their vocation), as well as sections on flora and fauna, the common folk, artisans and craftsmen, the military, spirits and the supernatural, the borderlands, and local officials.
Throughout the World of Wu Zhao, Rothschild’s masterful deconstruction of Zhang’s personal preferences and antipathies, based on the Confucian worldview that underlies all of his accounts, is critically reconstructed in a way that offers the reader a detailed rendering of a complex and colorful picture of people’s lives under Wu Zhao. This final volume in Rothschild’s trilogy will undoubtedly inspire diverse academic inquiries far into the future. — Journal of the American Society for Premodern Asia
Acknowledgments; Figures; Map; Tables; Weights and Measures; Introduction; Chapter 1 Wu Zhao: her inner palace, her inner circle; Chapter 2 The culture of the court; Chapter 3 “Cruel officials”: Wu Zhao’s “teeth and horns”; Chapter 4 Beyond court and capital: local officials; Chapter 5 The common people; Chapter 6 Relationships: men, women, and family in the time of Wu Zhao; Chapter 7 Generals and military men; Chapter 8 The frontier and beyond: foreigners and others during Wu Zhao’s reign; Chapter 9 Religion and the supernatural world; Chapter 10 Flora, fauna, and the natural world; Afternote; Appendix: People and Places; Notes; Bibliography; Index