My eminent person is Wu Zetian, the only female emperor of China. Though she is a very notable and remembered person in China (from what I have heard some schools in China and Hong Kong talk about her reign), she doesn’t seem to be very well known or respected in any English-speaking countries. This made getting an interview for my Eminent Person Project hard. For starters, I only wanted to speak to people who knew a considerable amount about Wu Zetian’s life. My written resources already went quite in-depth about her big accomplishments and palace life, but I wanted to know more about her personal life, like relationships with her family or her passions since no resources in English contained much about them. I know for a fact that Chinese resources have some notes about this but last time I used google translate, it translated something to “Fortune-telling fortune and fortune-telling”. These were the types of things I’d hope my interviewee would know. I found someone who fulfilled these requirements. After writing an email to their assistant, I got a “Sorry, their schedule is too full to assist you” and no recommendations on who else to contact. I browsed the internet and my resources for a while longer, but my investigation was fruitless. So, I decided that as long as they had correct facts about my eminent person, they would be a fine interviewee. But this didn’t broaden my selection by much. It’s easy to tell when someone doesn’t have the correct information about Wu Zetian because if their information is wrong, Wu Zetian will look more like a villainous tyrant who killed everyone than a good ruler with a side of dead aristocrats. I eventually found two professors that wrote books about Wu Zetian and teach Asian culture and history. Both though never responded. I am sure that if I could speak Mandarin fluently, my search would have been easier as ancient texts and firsthand accounts of people during her reign are a lot more easily accessible to the Chinese people. But at the end of the day, I don’t speak Mandarin and was not able to get an interview.
If I had gotten an interview, I would have asked about Wu Zetian’s early life. It’s noted in a lot of places that she loved to read, but some sources also say she was interested in arts. She later designed a new flag for the Chinese empire and took part in designing temples, so are there any other connections between Wu Zetian and art? Another thing I’d ask about is if Wu Zetian’s famous Twelve Suggestions are documented anywhere. I know what they were about, and I know what some of them are, but what were all of them? Another question I might have asked is how did Wu Zetian get painted as an evil murder? Many modern-day historians seem to forget that her crimes were ugly, but other emperors had even more ugly crimes and for the good of themselves and not the people. On top of that, some of my sources say that Wu Zetian had nightmares occasionally about people who died. So even though she didn’t stop killing people, she may have had some remorse. Since I couldn’t get answers to these easily, I had to put more effort into my research. I also used critical thinking to deduce possibilities of what the answers may be. For example, Confucian beliefs pretty much state that women are only good for being pretty and having babies. Maybe because of this, ancient Chinese record makers saw her crimes to be more heinous than usual. So, when writing the records, they put false or exaggerated information and modern-day historians that don’t have access to the actual accurate Chinese records mistake her for being more evil than she actually is.
In general, Wu Zetian is a very notable person. She accomplished things no one before or after her have ever accomplished. But because she was such an accomplished woman, historians have denied and altered her existence meaning that, unless you can speak Chinese, you’re not going to find all the information on her.