Shangguan Wan'er: The Azure Phoenix Takes Flight

She was the daughter of a disgraced minister, condemned to servitude in the palace, yet she wielded her brush like a blade and carved her name into the heights of power in the High Tang.

When she was seven, Shangguan Wan'er fell from being a chancellor's granddaughter to a palace slave. In the lightless depths of the palace service quarters, her mother, Madam Zheng, pointed to the balance beam and said, "You must weigh the world." Those words became the prophecy of her life.

Wu Zetian was both the enemy who destroyed her family and the emperor who taught her how to rule. From the palace service quarters to Zichen Hall, Wan'er learned to write the cruelest decrees in the most elegant verse, and to meet the deadliest traps with the gentlest smile. She oversaw imperial edicts for twenty years, becoming the empress's most trusted female chancellor. She judged poetry at the Flower Tower, led the literary fashion of her age, and earned the admiration of every scholar and poet who won her approval.

The Shenlong Coup, Empress Wei's rise to power, the Tanglong Coup... Amid the bloody whirlpool between the Li Tang dynasty and Wu Zhou, she struggled to maintain the balance. She remonstrated with Emperor Zhongzong at the risk of death four times and drafted edicts to counter Empress Wei, yet in the end, she could not escape political retribution.

This is no simple tale of a gifted woman. It is an epic of a woman using talent and intelligence to survive against all odds in a world ruled absolutely by men.

This book offers an in-depth look at:

· The true image of a woman who risked death to remonstrate, as revealed by her epitaph

· How she built cultural power through compiling books and judging poetry

· The complex, delicate alliances and rivalries among her, Wu Zetian, and Princess Taiping

· The splendor and cruelty of the High Tang court, and the rules and cost of its power games

When the azure phoenix's wings were broken, the woman who had been tasked with weighing the world measured, with her life, the distance between ideals and reality. Her story is a High Tang testament to talent, power, love, and survival.