Judge Dee knew what the poet monk was referring to. In her earlier days, Empress Wu had once served as a ‘palace female talent’ for the first emperor Li Shimin of the Tang Empire, who was said to have taken a liking to her. What might have happened in the royal palace was not difficult to imagine. And it was conventional that after the emperor’s death, those palace women who had been touched by the divine ruler would then have to stay single, huddled up for life in seclusion. However, the new emperor, Li Zhi, the son of the late emperor, actually fell head over heels for Wu. One thing leading to another, as a ‘palace female talent’ for the old emperor, Wu became an imperial concubine for the young emperor, a dramatic turn that appeared so scandalous, so intolerable to the orthodox Confucianist officials. When she was declared empress after the death of Li Zhi, she eventually found herself sitting on the throne as the supreme ruler of the whole nation. Of late, she had even tried to rename the Tang Empire as the Zhou Empire and to move the capital from Chang’an to Luoyang. Such a metamorphosis was naturally unacceptable to those who pledged allegiance to the Tang Dynasty of the Li family, and as a result, one rebellion after another broke out, but without any success.

Han Shan chose not to say too much as Judge Dee happened to be an orthodox Confucianist too, who protested against such moves on the part of the empress, yet, at the same time, was a senior trusted official serving under Empress Wu.

‘From time to time, Zi’an was able to sneak into the temple,’ Han Shan went on, changing the subject. ‘Xuanji had hoped that he would manage to eventually get her out of the nunnery, as he had promised, but Zi’an was then assigned to an official post far away from the capital. It was a matter of course for him to travel to the new post with his wife, and Xuanji was left alone in the nunnery. She was devastated by what she considered as his callous betrayal.

‘As the proverb says, it does not matter if you hurl a broken urn to the ground – it’s already broken anyway. She abandoned herself to despair, and then to debauchery. It did not take her long to start seeing men there in the open, night after night. With the reputation of the nunnery irreparably damaged, the abbess fled in the night, and Xuanji took it over as her own domain. She had a colorful banner displayed outside declaring, “Poetry Talk with Xuanji,” which provided a convenient pretext for her to receive men, and for the visitors to the nunnery as well. She turned into something of a high-class poetess/courtesan, cultivating connections for herself by hook or by crook, accepting money and gifts and favors and whatever else, though she did not necessarily have to pay it back with her body in bed, at least not every time—’