We read all the lead to present a different history.
Shangguan Wan'er was a well-known talented woman in the Tang Dynasty and a female secretary who was deeply trusted by Wu Zetian. Wu Zetian had a vendetta against Shangguan Wan'er for killing her father, but Wu Zetian admired her talent and left Shangguan Wan'er in the palace to let her handle the documents for her. Shangguan Wan'er relied on her own talents and abilities to gain the trust of Wu Zetian and became a confidant of the Wu clan. In 710, Li Longji, the king of Linzi, later Emperor Xuanzong of Tang, raised an army to launch the "Tanglong Coup", and Shangguan Wan'er and Wei Hou were killed at the same time.
Wei Hou was killed, which was self-inflicted, but the death of Shangguan Wan'er made posterity lament. As for the reason why Li Longji insisted on killing Shangguan Wan'er, there were many opinions. One of the more representative statements is that Shangguan Wan'er pressed the wrong treasure in the political struggle, but this statement is actually inconsistent with the facts. During the reign of Emperor Zhongzong of Tang, Shangguan Zhaorong was alone responsible for drafting imperial court documents. Shangguan Wan'er read important documents all day and approved manuscripts from all over the world, Shangguan Wan'er was a wise woman, who had accumulated a certain amount of political experience around Wu Zetian, and had a very close understanding of the rules of the power game; she was familiar with the korean faction, and Shangguan Wan'er even surpassed the emperor.
Her long secretarial work has given her a keen sense of politics. Although, at that time, the political factions of Wu, Wei, and Li in the imperial court coexisted, and the struggle between several factions was dazzling. However, Shangguan Wan'er always soberly saw that Wu Zetian was so powerful that it did not prevent Li Tang from restoring, and wu Sansi and Wei Hou were pediatrics regardless of their power and strategy, and could not become a climate, so she always chose to firmly stand on Li Tang's side. In the fourth year of Jinglong (May 710), Emperor Zhongzong died, and Empress Wei naturally wanted her son to succeed him, so she asked Wan'er to draft a will and let the sixteen-year-old Li Chongmao take the throne, allowing herself to assist the government like Wu Zetian and adjudicate the affairs of the military state.
Shangguan Wan'er showed amazing decisiveness and boldness at this moment, and she sent someone to contact Princess Taiping overnight, and the two of them drafted another testament in favor of Li Longji overnight; and sent someone to contact Li Longji to suggest that he should strike first. Li Longji led his troops to launch a coup d'état and killed Wei Hou and his cohorts. History refers to this coup d'état as the "Tanglong Coup". During the coup d'état, Shangguan Wan'er had always been Li Longji's internal response, and after saddle up, she was very busy.
However, just when Shangguan Wan'er was secretly happy that she had bet on the right treasure, waiting to be rewarded by Li Longji for her merits. What was ushered in was Li Longji's exalted butcher knife. Even if Princess Taiping took out the testament that Shangguan Wan'er had risen early to favor Li Longji to intercede for her, Shangguan Wan'er still did not escape death. Li Longji insisted on killing Shangguan Wan'er for the following three reasons:
After Li Xian, the crown prince of Tang Zhongzong, was restored to the throne, he was honored to be Shangguan Wan'er, was given the title of Zhaorong, and was entrusted with the heavy responsibility of secretary. Shangguan Wan'er later fell in love with Wu Sansi, often blowing pillows in front of Emperor Li Xian to promote the Wu clan, and the crown prince Li Chongjun was indignant about this. In July of the first year of Jinglong (707 AD), Li Chongjun and the Zuo Yulin general Li Duozuo and others forged the Holy Will to collude with the Yulin army to rebel, trying to suppress the Wu clan in one fell swoop, and also tried to kill Shangguan Wan'er.
The crown prince sent more than three hundred people to Yulin's army and killed them into the palace, and Shangguan Wan'er hurriedly fled to Li Xian, saying that the prince wanted to kill you and usurp the throne. One sentence made Emperor Zhongzong think that the coup was directed at him, and eventually led to the murder of the prince. In fact, this reason is also a bit far-fetched, the prince forged the holy will to rebel, no matter which emperor can not tolerate, is a capital crime. It has nothing to do with Shangguan Wan'er. Besides, the prince was killed and eliminated a competitor, which was a good thing for Li Longji. So this was not the main reason why Shangguan Wan'er was killed.
Shangguan Wan'er, as the emperor's woman, had a love triangle relationship with Wu Sansi and Cui Xiang, a soldier who was 6 years younger than herself, which was a shame for the Li family and a scandal in the Li family; this made Li Longji, a man of the Li family, feel the most intolerable. Although Li Longji later fell in love with his daughter-in-law, he was not a moral model, but the more dirty the man in his heart, the more he hated the woman who cheated on his family. In ancient China, men did not care about cheating, but if a woman cheated, it was a heinous crime.
When the Tang Dynasty was in Wu Zetian, women were in charge, and the Li family was almost destroyed. After Wu Zetian, Shangguan Wan'er took advantage of the emperor's favor to influence the decision-making of the imperial court, playing the emperor in applause, cultivating dead parties, sabotaging the imperial program, and causing chaos in the palace. This is Li Tang's great shame, even more than the red apricots of the Li family's daughters-in-law. Because women's interference in politics made the Tang court a miasma, the negative impact caused by it was too great. It's disgusting and heart-wrenching.
This third was the real reason why Li Longji wanted to kill Shangguan Wan'er. There was no personal vendetta between him and Shangguan Wan'er, but he admired her talent. But he was going to kill Shangguan Wan'er to make an example for Li Tang Liwei. Li Longji hoped to tell the women of the world through the death of Shangguan Wan'er that no one should want to meddle in Li Tang's politics again, otherwise, Wei Hou and Shangguan Wan'er would be role models. Six years later, his aunt Princess Taiping tried to intervene in politics, and Li Longji put him to death, not to mention a Shangguan Wan'er.
In short, Shangguan Wan'er had not committed any rebellious crimes; if she was really at fault, she should not have entered the palace. The year after Shangguan Wan'er's death, Li Tang restored Shangguan Zhaorong's status and was posthumously honored as "Huiwen". This is also a strong proof of Shangguan Wan'er's innocence. After Li Longji ascended the throne, he also ordered people to collect Shangguan Wan'er's works and compile them into an anthology. Shangguan Wan'er was talented and talented, and could have become a female poet. However, it is a pity that he was unfortunately caught in the palace and fell victim to the power struggle.