ouse at
Tung-Chow and made her one of his royal wives. Five years after, in the
year 655, she was declared Empress, and during the reign of her lazy and
indolent husband she was "the power behind the throne." And when, in
the year 683, Kaou-tsung died, she boldly assumed the direction of
the government, and, ascending the throne, declared herself Woo How
Tsih-tien--Woo the Empress Supreme and Sovereign Divine.

History records that this Zenobia of China proved equal to the great
task. She "governed the empire with discretion," extended its borders,
and was acknowledged as empress from the shores of the Pacific to the
borders of Persia, of India, and of the Caspian Sea.

Her reign was one of the longest and most successful in that period
known in history as the Golden Age of China. Because of the relentless
native prejudice against a successful woman, in a country where girl
babies are ruthlessly drowned, as the quickest way of ridding the world
of useless incumbrances, Chinese historians have endeavored to blacken
her character and undervalue her services. But later scholars now see
that she was a powerful and successful queen, who did great good to her
native land, and strove to maintain its power and glory.

She never forgot her good friend and protector, Thomas the Nestorian.
During her long reign of almost fifty years, Christianity strengthened
in the kingdom, and obtained a footing that only the great Mahometan
conquests of five centuries later entirely destroyed; and the Empress
Woo, so the chronicles declare, herself "offered sacrifices to the great
God of all." When, hundreds of years after, the Jesuit missionaries
penetrated into this most exclusive of all the nations of the earth,
they found near the palace at Chang-an the ruins of the Nestorian
mission church, with the cross still standing, and, preserved through
all the changes of dynasties, an abstract in Syriac characters of the
Christian law, and with it the names of seventy-two attendant priests
who had served the church established by O-lo-pun.

Thus, in a land in which, from the earliest ages, women have been
regarded as little else but slaves, did a self-possessed and wise young
girl triumph over all difficulties, and rule over her many millions of
subjects "in a manner becoming a great prince." This, even her enemies
admit. "Lessening the miseries of her subjects," so the historians
declare, she governed the wide Empire of China wisely, discreetly