In the waning years of the Zhenguan era, Su Huaijin was a young woman of uncommon ambition and integrity. While visiting Xiangxiu Temple in Chang'an, she turned to her companions and said, “If a man can do it, why can't a woman?” Wu, then a talented lady accompanying Emperor Taizong to the temple, heard her words and looked at her closely.
Not long afterward, Taizong died, and Wu entered Ganye Temple, as was customary. Huaijin was then an assistant magistrate in Bianzhou. When she heard the news, she rode day and night for three days to reach Chang'an, then slipped into the temple under cover of darkness to see Wu. Wu said, “I am about to return to the palace. This journey will raise me up like a dragon, or consume me like fire. Will you come with me?” Huaijin replied, “Your Majesty will be a woman ruling as sovereign, and I will be your Su Qing. I will follow you, in life or death.”
Over the next fifty years, Wu rose from Zhaoyi to empress and then empress regnant, eventually ending the Tang dynasty and ruling the empire in her own right. Huaijin, meanwhile, rose from legal officer in Bianzhou to posts in Bingzhou, Ningzhou, and Yuzhou, then served in the capital as a court judge and investigating censor, before becoming a chief councilor at the Phoenix Pavilion and Luan Terrace. She was known as the Elder of the Realm.
The two found understanding in the privacy of their chambers, and met again in prefectures and counties. In the year of the imperial sacrifice at Mount Tai, Wu once visited Bingzhou in disguise, where she and Huaijin jointly resolved a water-rights dispute between Han and frontier peoples. During a year when she held court, she secretly traveled to Ningzhou by a back road and helped judge a land dispute between Qiang and Han families. The court knew only that Lord Su was upright and unyielding; it did not know there was someone behind the curtain. The people simply called them Father Su and Mother Su, knowing nothing of the years spent in the palace.
Huaijin never married, nor did she receive an ennobling decree. In her final memorial, she wrote, “When the histories of our country are written, let Your Majesty have the annals and let me have a biography, both bound in the same volume. That will be our marriage contract.” Wu died five years later. Her final decree removed her imperial title and ordered her burial at Qianling. She also secretly instructed that the words “Bingzhou's Su and I pledged to grow old together” be engraved in the tomb record. The succeeding emperor could not bear to defy her wish, yet feared tarnishing Huaijin's reputation for integrity, so he erected a stele without an inscription.
A thousand years later, the stele at Qianling still stands, blank.
Theme: Two women conspire to rule the realm, and the blank stele becomes their marriage vow.
